340 NATURAL SCIENCE. November. 



admission to its halls which has not some living, inspiring thought 

 behind it, and which is not capable of teaching some valuable lesson." 

 Fortunately for the world his enormous experience does not altogether 

 die with him, for in their Report for 1895, the Museums Association 

 printed his codification of "The Principles of Museum Administration," 

 from which we cull a single aphorism. " A finished museum is a 

 dead museum, and a dead museum is a useless museum." We wish 

 that space permitted us to say more ; but, after all, no further words 

 could express our poignant regret at the loss of this man, snatched 

 from us in the prime of life. 



SIR FERDINAND VON MUELLER. 

 Born 1825. Died October g, 1896. 



THIS eminent botanist, one of the m.ost distinguished men of 

 science of the southern hemisphere, was born at Rostock in 

 Germany in 1825, and as a boy showed great fondness for botany. At 

 the age of twenty-one he was told that his only chance of life was 

 emigration to a warm climate. He accordingly sailed for Australia, 

 and has lived there for the last fifty years. In 1852 he was appointed 

 Government botanist of the colony of Victoria, and in that capacity, 

 following the lead of Robert Brown, has done more than anybody for 

 the development of Australian botany. In the first ten years of his 

 residence in Australia he made many important and arduous botanical 

 expeditions to various parts of what was then a comparatively little- 

 known continent. He acted as botanist to Mr. A. C. Gregory's 

 expedition of exploration in tropical Australia in the years 1855 and 

 1856, and was one of the first to ascend the Australian Alps, and to 

 explore their rich stores of botanical treasure. In these extensive 

 land journeys, to which Dr. (now Sir Joseph) Hooker refers in some 

 detail in his essay on the Flora of Australia, he covered upwards of 

 20,000 miles. 



Baron von Mueller was a most voluminous writer, his works, 

 which deal almost exclusively with Australian botany, forming a 

 library in themselves on its systematic and economic aspect. 



In his many books and papers he dealt with both the recent and 

 the fossil botany of the continent ; his chief contributions to science 

 may be here recalled : — Fragmenta Phytographise Australiae (11 vols., 

 1858-1881); Eucalyptographia (1879-84) ; Index perfectus ad Caroli 

 Linnaei Species Plantarum . . . 1753 (1880); Iconography of Australian 

 Species of Acacia (1887-88) ; New Vegetable Fossils from the 

 Australian Drifts (1874, ^^c.) ; Select Plants eligible for industrial 

 culture or naturalisation in Victoria (1876) ; and " Select Extra- 

 Tropical Plants readily eligible for industrial culture," which went 

 through many editions, of which the ninth appeared in 1895. 



When a general "Flora of Austraha " was contemplated, Mueller, 

 in the hope that the work would be entrusted to him, devoted his 



