THE VICTORIAN NATURALIST. 95 



the originator, of movements for the scientific, social, and 

 material welfare of the country he had made his home, and in 

 spite of his not being a practical horticulturist, he did more 

 probably than any other person to promote the commercial — that 

 is to say the useful — development of cultural industries in Aus- 

 tralia, and more than any other person in the diffusion of useful 

 Australian plants in other parts of the world ; he had probably a 

 wider correspondence than any living botanist, and few are the 

 establishments that have not been in some way benefited by him. 

 The value of his work consists largely in the fact that he did 

 exactly the kind of work that was required in a young country 

 for its material as well as for its moral development.' 



" Baron von Mueller was in many respects fortunate in his life. 

 After having shown as a lad a strong taste for botanical studies 

 in Schleswig-Holstein, the delicate state of his health drove him 

 to the shores of Australia, whose genial climate restored him to 

 such robustness as allowed him to work unremittingly at his 

 favourite studies, enabled him for several years to undergo not 

 inconsiderably physical hardship, both in the hot climate of the 

 north of the continent, and in the cold and snows of our Aus- 

 tralian Alps, and allowed him to die in harness at the ripe age of 

 seventy-two. Not only was the Baron fortunate in possessing 

 sufficient strength, aided by most temperate and abstemious 

 habits of life, to spend fifty years in the continuous prosecution 

 of somewhat laborious work ; but he was fortunate in receiving a 

 position, when still a young man, which enabled him to devote 

 his life to his special study, and which placed him for many 

 years in a most favourable position for widening his knowledge, 

 obtaining botanical information, and publishing the results of his 

 work. 



" It is well known how eagerly, how zealously, and how 

 indefatigably Baron von Mueller availed himself of his oppor- 

 tunity, and how, not content with utilizing the funds granted by 

 Parliament to the Government Botanist's Office, he spent freely 

 from his own salary in the purchase of books, and in subsidizing 

 private collectors. 



" For the first three or four years after his official appointment 

 Dr. Mueller had what must have been to him the keenest of plea- 

 sures — the exploration of a new botanical region in our own Aus- 

 tralian Alps, and a glance through the key of Victorian plants will 

 show how well he employed his opportunity, name after name of our 

 alpine plants having been given by him as their first discoverer and 

 describer. In 1855 Dr. Mueller also accompanied the Gregory 

 Expedition for the exploration of Central and Northern Australia, 

 and so had unequalled facilities for studying a nearly unknown 

 portion of the flora of the continent — facilities which, it need not 

 be said, he utilized to the utmost. Baron von Mueller showed how 



