XXX11 



a deputy-lieutenant of the county of Wigtownshire. He was not less 

 highly respected among the gentry of his county and the tenants of 

 his estate than in the circles of scientific society in London, in 

 which his presence was so long conspicuous. 



J. W. J. 



By the death of Baron FERDINAND vox MUELLER Australia has lost 

 a botanist and geographer who stood in the foremost rank of the 

 scientific men of the southern hemisphere. Ferdinand Jakob 

 Heinrich Mueller was born in 1825 at Rostock, of which town his 

 father was Commissioner of Customs. He was educated for the 

 medical profession at Kiel, where he graduated as Ph.D., after having 

 devoted much of his time as a student to the botany of Schleswig 

 and Holstein. Soon after attaining his majority he was seized with 

 an affection of the lungs, and having lost both parents from con- 

 sumption, he resolved to seek a more genial climate than that of North 

 Germany. He accordingly in 1847 left for Australia, to which country 

 there was then a considerable emigration from Germany. This was 

 not till after the completion of his first botanical essay, " Breviarium 

 Plantarum Ducatus Slesvicensis austro-occidentalis," which was not 

 published till 1853.* He had meanwhile been enrolled as a member 

 of the German Association for the Advancement of Science, which 

 had jnst been instituted by Oken. 



After his arrival in Australia, Mueller acted for a short time as 

 assistant to a chemist in Adelaide, but being at once fascinated by 

 the interest and novelty of the flora, and having apparently some 

 private means, he gave himself up unreservedly to botanical and 

 geographical exploration. Leaving Adelaide, he crossed over to 

 Victoria in 1848, with the especial object of visiting the then all but 

 unknown Australian Alps, and connecting their flora with that of 

 Tasmania. 



During the several years devoted to this object, he, alone and 

 unaided except by the contributions of a few generous friends, dis- 

 played great intrepidity as an explorer, penetrating into the interior 

 as far as the Murray River, in crossing which he nearly lost his life, 

 effecting the first triangulation of any part of the Victorian Alps, and 

 making extensive botanical collections abounding in novelty and in- 

 terest. At the same time he entered into correspondence with botanists 

 in Europe, sending them duplicates of his discoveries, and letters that 

 at once established his reputation as a young naturalist of great 

 attainments and astonishing powers of work. 



Amongst his English correspondents was Sir W. Hooker, who 

 interested himself in his favour with Mr. Goulburn, then on the 

 point of leaving England as Lieutenant- Governor of Victoria, and who 

 * ' Flora,' vol. 36, p. 473. 



