THE VICTORIAN NATURALIST. 17 



SOME EARLY BOTANICAL EXPLORATIONS IN 

 VICTORIA. 



(With Map.) 

 By F. G. a, Barnard. 



{Read before the Field Naturalists' Club of Victoria, Wth April, 1904.) 



My visil to the Victorian Alps in December, 1902, interested me 

 in more ways than one. The biological results of the trip have 

 already been given in the paper, " Among the Alpine Flowers," 

 read before the Club just twelve months ago ( Victorian 

 Naturalist, xx., p. 4). In the present paper I propose to refer to 

 some historical questions which arose in my mind when I subse- 

 quently had occasion to turn up the literature in connection with 

 the early history of some of our Alpine plants. 



The first reference to the mountains we know as the Alps seems 

 to be in Hume and Hovell's account of their journey to Port 

 Phillip in 1824, when they passed between Mt. Stanley and the 

 present site of Beechworth and saw snow-capped mountains 

 away to the south-east, but did not visit them, keeping to the 

 westward of the Buffaloes. Angus M'Millan, the discoverer of 

 Gippsland (Caledonia Australis, as he called it), doubtless saw 

 the Alps on his journey in 1839 from the Maneroo Plains, 

 N.S.VV., to what is now the Tambo Valley, where he formed a 

 cattle station at Numbie Munjee, about 50 miles south of Omeo 

 (see " Letters from Victorian Pioneers," published by Melbourne 

 Public Library Trustees, 1899, also " Report on Physical Char- 

 acteristics and Resources of Gippsland," by A. Skene and R. 

 Brough Smyth, Melbourne, February, 1874), but he probably 

 travelled on the southern side of the mountains. Count Strzelecki 

 explored in the Omeo and Kosciusko districts about 1840, pur- 

 suing mainly geological investigations, but our late patron. Baron 

 von Mueller, then Dr. F. Mueller, was the first white man to 

 ascend our highest Victorian peaks, in 1853 and 1854, and reveal 

 their botanical treasures. 



Few people are, I think, aware of the amount of ground Dr. 

 Mueller covered in those early days, and searched so thoroughly 

 as to leave but little in the way of unnoticed plants for those who 

 followed after, and it seems incredible, when we consider the 

 sparseness of the population and the absence of roads, how he 

 managed to carry out his trips with so much success. I had 

 hoped that some abler pen than mine would have given ere this 

 some fuller account of his life and work than appeared in the 

 Club's journal some years ago {Victorian Naturalist, xiii., 1896-7, 

 p. 87 ; also xiv., 1897-8, p. 94). 



However, up to the present, such a work has not appeared, 

 and I have therefore taken the liberty of reviving for your benefit 

 his first three annual reports, which are buried away, along with 



