ASA GRAY'S LETTERS.* To botanists everywhere, Dr. Asa Gray's name
is familiar as that of the foremost student of their science whom America has produced, and as the man who, beyond all others, has brought into order the flora of that great continent. To some English readers he will be best known by the frequent men- tion of him in the letters and writings of Darwin ; but by a certain group of English men and women, he will long be remembered as a loved and honoured friend, and as one of the most delightful of companions.
The story of his life is shortly told. In 1810, he was born at Sanquoit, "on the eastern or Methodist side of the Creek," in Oneida County, near the middle of the State of New York, his father being a tanner, and afterwards a farmer. The boy showed a strong taste for reading, and very little for farming, and so his father sent him to a country medical school, at a place called Fairfield, where in the year 1831 he received the degree of M.D. Bat the attractions, first, of mineralogy, and subsequently of botany, were stronger than those of medicine. He was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of Dr. Torrey, a New York botanist, who treated him with the greatest kindness ; and, in 1838, having been appointed Pro- fessor of Natural History in the newly founded University of Michigan, he was sent to Europe to spend $5,000 on behalf of the University in the purchase of books. At Glasgow he was received into the house of Sir William Hooker, and treated with an almost paternal kindness by that excellent man. In 1842 he was appointed Professor of Natural History at Har- vard College, and went to Cambridge, where he lived from that year till his death in 1888,—except so far as his residence there was broken by frequent journeys in America, and still more by frequent visits to, and abode in, England and other parts of Europe. He crossed the Atlantic seven times in each direction.
The elder botanists, LinnTus, Tournefort, the Jussieus, were essentially systematists ; and the discovery of species and the formation of genera, and the orderly presentation of the great web of vegetable life, was their great aim. But by he side of systematic botany there was growing up the great science of vegetable physiology,—a science closely related, not only with physics and chemistry, bat still more nearly with animal physiology, and with which it was destined to be united under the comprehensive name of Biology—and plants were examined and questioned as living things. Then came the doctrine of evolution in the hands of Mr. Darwin, and species which Linn:Tits and his followers had looked upon as enduring creations of God, came to be regarded as transitory forms inthe endless dance of organic life. The result has been a depreciation—an undue depreciation, as it seems to us—of the older classificatory science. The sys- tematic botanist is to the evolutionist what the geographer is to the geologist. The geographer investigates the existing -condition of the country—its mountains, its valleys, its rivers, and its coasts—and though be knows that these are under- going more or less of change day by day, he treats of them as fixed and constant objects. The geologist comes next into the field, and tells us the past history of the area in question —its subsidence, its elevation, its denudation—and so enables us to understand how, from a certain assumed primary condi- tion, it has passed into its present state. But till the
* _Letters of Asa Gray. Edited by Jane L. Gray. Boston and New York : Houghton, hi:Alin, and Co. 1893.
geographer has done his part the geologist can hardly begin his labours, and he has no right to treat them with other than profound respect. So the systematic botanist surveys the face of the vegetable world as it now is, and, in spite of its slight variations, regards it as fixed, and he leaves to the evolutionist the task of unfolding from out of the bosom of an unknown but assumed past the present order of creation.
Dr. Gray was a systematic botanist of the very first rank, and the greater portion of his arduous days was passed in devotion to that study. The flora of North America was in an almost chaotic condition when he took it for his province. His friend, Dr. Torrey, had made some begin- ning on a Flora, but he had not advanced far. At first Dr. Gray had, partly at least, to seek for his materials by his own labours in the field ; but when he was established at Cambridge, and his herbarium there was, as it were, the official workshop for the United States, materials flowed in upon him in ever-increasing volume. "I have settled down to my work with enjoyment," he writes in 1882 on his return from Europe, "but with a growing sense of dis- couragement, proving me of an onbarras de richesses. It was natural to find here a great accumulation of collections of North American plants, all needing examination; but un- fortunately they continue to come in faster than I can study and dispose of them. This comes from the in- creasing number of botanical explorers and the new facilities offered to them by new railroads along our South-Western frontiers and other out-of-the-way re-
gions." Dr. Gray's letters give a vivid picture of his labours in this way,—now spending day after day in the examination of plants transmitted to him ; now suggesting fresh fields for search to the collectors ; now spending day after day, and week after week, at Kew or London or Paris or Vienna, in the study of the collections of the earlier botanists, and the examination of the original specimens to which the specific names had been assigned ; and even bring- ing his specimens across the Atlantic for comparison with those contained in the cabinets of Europe. And all this while his pen was ever busy not only in a large corre- spondence with botanists in Europe and America, but in a series of writings partly of a highly technical character, partly of text-books and manuals intended to encourage amongst his countrymen the study of his favourite science. But his devotion to systematic botany did not prevent Dr. Gray from taking an eminent part in the discussion of the larger questions which have of late years gathered around biology. Agassiz was the colleague of Gray at Harvard ; and it is well known that he long ago eagerly discussed the profound questions that relate to the creation and spread of organic beings. Sir Joseph Hooker, whose labours on the geographical distribution of plants did much to pave the way for Darwin, was perhaps Gray's oldest living friend; and to Gray himself Darwin had turned for information and assistance as early as 1855, whilst engaged in the incubation of his great theory ; and to him he had, prior to its publica- tion, communicated an abstract of the Origin of Species. When the book appeared, there was no one more prepared than Dr. Gray to appreciate it. He was as hearty an evolu- tionist as Darwin himself. But from many of the proposi- tions contained in the Origin, he dissented. Darwin's bearing towards teleology was entirely at variance with his convictions, and he was not satisfied with natural selection as an adequate cause for the lines along which evolution has worked. "Variation (inherent), in particular directions," he writes to Dana, "is your idea and mine, but is very anti- Darwin." There was a real danger, which it is now very difficult to realise, that Darwin's book might fall stillborn from the press—that his theory might fail to attract atten- tion or discussion—but from this peril it was saved by the courage and candour of many of the contemporary men of science—above all others, of Lyell, Hooker, and Huxley in England, and of Gray in America. He supervised the American edition of the work, he reviewed it, he replied to the attacks on it, especially from Agassiz ; and without concealing the differences of opinion between Darwin and himself, he made a manful fight for the cause of evolution. "No one," wrote Darwin to Lyell, "I think, understands the whole case better than Asa Gray, and he has been fighting nobly. He is a capital reasoner." The controversy called out Gray's great powers. He seized the whole bearings of the very complicated set of facts with
extraordinary clearness, and discussed the whole matter with great breadth and vigour. In acknowledging the receipt of one of Gray's papers in the Atlantic Monthly, Darwin writes to him : "I said, in a former letter, that you were a lawyer; but I made a gross mistake. I am sure that you are a poet. No, by Jove ! I will tell you what you are,—a hybrid, a com- plex cross of lawyer, poet, naturalist, and theologian ! Was there ever such a monster seen before ? "
In 1876, the principal papers which Dr. Gray had written in connection with this discussion were collected and pub- lished under the rather awkward title of Darwiniana, a book reviewed in these columns not long after its appearance.
We all know what a deadening effect is often produced on the mind by the prolonged pursuit of knowledge of one parti- cular kind. We know how often in the mere scientific man there occurs a kind of atrophy of other interests,—how, as he grows older, he loses all taste for poetry, for fiction, for art, and acquires perhaps some suspicion of the emotions. If the countless days passed over dried plants and in the botanic gardens at Cambridge had produced something of this kind in Dr. Gray, it would have created no surprise. But it was surprising that no such result was produced in him,—that the strong and earnest religious beliefs of his youth (for which, as for much else, he was, it appears, greatly indebted to his early friends, Dr. and Mrs. Torrey, of New York) remained fresh in his old age; that his love of scenery was as keen as ever ; and that his interest in philosophical questions, in politics, and art, continued lively and strong; that he remained still the strange kind of monster that Darwin had playfully delineated. Instead of his letters written in old age being less broad in their sympathies than those of his youth, the contrary appears to be the case. Of the two volumes before us, we should select the second as containing more letters of general interest than the earlier volume. "I forgot," he writes in 1879, "to ask if you or your friend Lord Blackford knew Arthur James Balfour, M.P., author of A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, published recently by Macmillan It is the most masterly essay I have seen of late years, and I should like to know who the man is, and what you think of his book." This is one of the many illus- trations of his interest in contemporary literature and philo- sophy. In politics it will easily be supposed that Dr. Gray never took part ; but he was not an uninterested spectator of what went on in public life, either in America or in this country. His early visits to England, and his friendship with many dis- tinguished Englishmen, naturally inclined him to regard us and even our dealings with his own country with a friendly -eye; but the way in which England for the most part regarded the War of Secession, and the sympathy so plainly shown by our most influential men and newspapers with the rebel South, touched him, and as we think most justly, to the quick. "It does seem," he writes to Mr. Darwin, "that all England wishes us to be weak and divided; perhaps that is good national policy. But the more that is so, the more necessary it is for us to vindicate our integrity at whatever cost. Let us have it out now, even at the cost of ten times what it has cost so far." Amongst English states- men, Gladstone, beyond any one else, seems to have attracted Dr. Gray's interest and regard. But in 1887, Dr. Gray's views changed with the change in Mr. Gladstone himself, and he -writes, "I certainly at your last election should have gone against Gladstone. How so many of my countrymen—I mean thoughtful people—approve of Home-rnle—i.e., semi-secession —I hardly understand."
There are few things more difficult—perhaps we should rather say that there is nothing more impossible—than for the biographer to reproduce the living image of the dead man; and to this rule, the present volumes are no exception. In fact, they do not profess to contain a biography; they are little other than extracts from Dr. Gray's own letters; from these, and perhaps even more from his Darwiniana, and from the Collection of Dr. Gray's Scientific Papers, published in 1889, -which contains many biographical notices of his scientific friends, it will always be possible to learn, to some extent, what manner of man Dr. Asa Gray was ; but the one and the other will alike fail to communicate the peculiar charm of his person- ality. In reference to these volumes of collected papers, the late Dean Church, one of the oldest and dearest of Dr. Gray's friends, wrote
-"There is a special cachet in all Dr. Gray's papers, great and small, which is his own, and which seems to me to distinguish him from even his more famous contemporaries. There is the scientific spirit in it, but farm, imaginative, fearless, cautious, with large horizons, and very attentive and careful to objections and qualifications ; and there is beside what is so often wanting in scientific writing, the human spirit, always remembering that besides facts and laws, however wonderful and minute, there are souls and characters over against them, of as great account as they, an whose mirrors they are reflected, whom they excite and delight,
and without whose interest they would be blanks The sweetness and charity which we remember so well in living con- verse is always on the look-out for some pleasant feature in the people of whom he writes, and to give kindliness and equity to his judgment."
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