LETTERS OF ASA GRAY

EDITED BY

JANE LORING GRAY

IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1894
Copyright, 1893,
By JANE LORING GRAY.
All rights reserved.

CONTENTS.

Note on the Illustrations. [The frontispiece portrait of Dr. Gray] is a photogravure from a photograph taken in 1880. The plate of Dr. Gray in his study, facing [page 529], is from a photograph taken in 1879. The view of the present Range of Buildings in the Botanic Garden, facing [page 614], is from a photograph taken for this work.

LETTERS OF ASA GRAY.

CHAPTER V.
SECOND JOURNEY IN EUROPE.—CORRESPONDENCE.
1850-1859.

Dr. Gray sailed for England with Mrs. Gray in a sailing packet June 11, 1850. The steamers made regular trips, but the fine packets were still running, and it was thought desirable to try the longer voyage for Mrs. Gray’s health.

Dr. Gray renewed acquaintance with his old friends, and made many new ones, meeting at his friend Mr. Ward’s, where they first stayed, many of the younger men, Henfrey, Forbes, etc., who had become known in science since his former visit in 1839.

TO JOHN TORREY.

Ghent, Belgium, July 16, 1850.

I surely meant that you should have heard of us long ere this. But there seemed not to be a moment of time during the fortnight we spent in England; Mr. Ward kept us so busy with every sort of engagement and sight-seeing that J. could enjoy. I meant to have written at Dover last evening; but it was not convenient, so now that we are for the first night in a strange country (which England is not) I must tell you, what I trust you have learned from Carey (to whom I had occasion to write hurriedly, last mail), that we had a very pleasant voyage of seventeen and a half days and came near making it in fourteen, as we made land early on the morning of the twelfth day out, no storms, but gentle favoring breezes till we made the Irish coast; and then, to our disappointment, we had head winds to beat against all the way up to Holyhead, and reached Liverpool Saturday morning....

On Monday we left Liverpool, which has vastly improved since you saw it; stopping at Coventry and turning off to Leamington to see, at Darlington’s desire, the descendants of old Peter Collinson,[1] and deliver some books and letters from him, which I did. Mrs. Collinson was ill with a severe fall, but her daughter received the things I brought, and showed me a portrait of Peter. Then Mrs. Gray and I made an excursion to Warwick Castle, the fine ruins of Kenilworth, and Stoneleigh Abbey, driving through six or seven miles of fine park. The next day on to London, to Ward, who had insisted on our visiting him. He lives three and a half miles out of London, in a pleasant and quiet suburban house; his son being established in Wellclose Square.

Boott I saw the same evening I arrived, and two days later, with J., but not later. He has been quite sick with an influenza, and a slight but not altogether pleasant inflammation of the lungs.

To Hooker I went at once also, and got your kind letter there, and saw Kew. Hooker is quite well; but Lady H. is very poorly.... She inquired most particularly and affectionately after yourself, and asked about all your family....

On Monday I made another visit to Kew Gardens, (a grand affair) to show the lions of the place to four or five young Americans I knew, one of them young Brace,[2] J.’s cousin, who is making with two friends a pleasant and profitable pedestrian excursion in England.[3] I cannot begin to tell you the half we have done and seen in England, but we were most busy: Saturday, conversazione of Royal Botanical Society in Regent’s Park. Wednesday, excursion with Linnæan Club to Hertford; saw a great Pinetum, 600 species of Coniferæ, etc., and the Panshanger Oak. (I wrote Carey a few words of this.) Thursday, a most pleasant day with Hooker. Miss Hooker looks quite well; all send their love to you, all most kind and sweet to us. Hooker has altered little, but looks older. Brown looks older perhaps, but decidedly stronger, is as healthy as possible and very lively. In talking with him and showing him about it he gave up about Krameria, and said I must be right. He formerly unequivocally referred it to Polygalaceæ. Bennett is large and fat. I fear he does not work hard enough.

Yesterday we came down to Dover early in the afternoon (a striking place), and embarked late in the evening on steamer for Ostend, which we reached early this morning; came right on to Bruges, which listless and very curious old-world town, and its curiosities, we have all day been exploring, till six o’clock, when we came on twenty-eight miles further by railway to the famous and more lively town of Ghent,—where I have been running about till the dusk arrived, and must now to bed, as we have to finish Ghent to-morrow before dinner, and go on to Antwerp afterwards, thence to Cologne. I think we shall cut Brussels.

At Ghent saw the Belfry and the strange old Town Hall.... I went to the Botanic Garden (did not find Professor Kickx),—hardly as large as ours at Cambridge, and by no means so rich or half so well kept, though said to be the best in Belgium; explored the university library, and strolled through the streets and along the canals....

Antwerp.—Imagine us settled comfortably at Hotel du Parc, Wednesday evening, overlooking the Place Verte, our windows commanding a near and most advantageous view of the finest cathedral in Belgium, with light enough still to see pretty well against the sky the graceful outlines and much of the light tracery and Gothic work of this gem of a steeple, one of the loftiest in the world (403 feet, 7 inches) and probably unsurpassed by any for lightness, grace, and the elaborateness of the carved work. Napoleon compared it to Mechlin lace. And such sweet chimes, every fifteen minutes! The chime at the beginning of the hour still rings in our ears. We have never tired of listening to it....

Bonn, July 22.

We drove through the city (Cologne) to the station of the Bonn railroad. But on the way the driver, of his own motion, stopped at the door of the cathedral. Finding that we had time enough to take a good look before the train left, we could not resist, and saw this wonder and masterpiece of true Gothic architecture; which by the united efforts of most North German powers is going on toward completion, in the style and plan on which it was commenced seven hundred or eight hundred years ago, and in which the choir was finished, and the transepts and nave commenced. It is most grand; the grandest thing we ever saw, though the nave bears only a temporary roof, at thirty or forty feet less than the full height. The ancient stained glass comes fully up to one’s expectation. I have never seen the like.

We went up to Poppelsdorf; such charming and picturesque view of the Siebengebirge (seven mountains) and the Godesberg, etc., from the professor’s windows and the Botanic Garden; the museums rich and curious, and parts of the old château in which they are (now surrendered to the university) not less so. The botanical professors, Treviranus[4] and Dr. Roemer, very kind; some collections to be made ready here for me to examine when we come back, so that I must then spend a day here....

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

Geneva, August 16, 1850.

We went up the Rhine to Coblenz, Bingen, and Mayence; thence to Frankfort. By some mistake in the post office in giving me the address, your letter to Dr. Fresenius[5] I took to a law-doctor Fresenius, who was away in Switzerland. So I gave up all hopes of seeing him, and we fell to seeing the sights by ourselves, when, a few hours before we had arranged to go to Heidelberg, the true Dr. Fresenius came in. We may see him again on our way back. We went to Heidelberg, for an hour or two only....

It is now the 20th,—time passed fast. I work to-day in herbariums De Candolle and Boissier, and to-morrow morning we go to Freiburg and Berne and the Bernese Oberland. We cannot be back now in England so early as we expected; but still hope to be there by the 20th September....

Thursday morning, after an early breakfast, went on by railroad to Kehl; left our luggage and took a carriage over the bridge of boats, across the lines of the French republic (?) into Strasburg. Saw Schimper;[6] then we went to the cathedral, viewed the grand front of this imposing structure, and the wonderful spire, the tallest in the world; were much struck with the grandeur of the interior, wholly lighted by stained glass, the greater part of it 400 or 500 years old. After visiting the Museum of Natural History, and arranging with Schimper to meet him in Switzerland, where he is to pass with his wife (a Swiss lady) a long vacation, we took our carriage and returned to the Baden side of the river, and came on to Freiburg (in the Breisgau) that evening, reaching it in the rain....

Professor Braun,[7] the brother of the first Mrs. Agassiz, was very kind to us. He is a very interesting man, of charming manners; his wife very sweet and charming, his children most engaging. Saturday afternoon we took a carriage, and with Professor Braun rode up a beautiful valley to the Höllenthal (French, Vallée d’Enfer), a rocky and wooded gorge of very striking scenery; wild and majestic, rather than terrible, as its name imports....

In the afternoon visited the cathedral, one of the finest and oldest in Europe, that is well preserved. Here nearly every part, and all the stained glass, of a most curious kind, is perfectly preserved; and the spire, though not so high as that of Strasburg, is as elaborate and light,—as it were of woven stone thread,—and even more beautiful....

Tuesday we rode from Bâle to Bienne (fifty-six miles) in a diligence, from eight A.M. to five P.M., through the Münster Thal, the grandest and most picturesque scenery of the Jura.

Wednesday, a ride of three hours along lakes of Bienne and Neuchâtel brought us to Neuchâtel at eleven o’clock A.M. ... Professor Godet,[8] who received me most cordially, took me (with Mr. Coulon) up the Chaumont, 2,500 feet; but the Alps were obscured by clouds, at least the higher Alps, and we had no fine view of them; otherwise the view was very fine. We returned by the great boulder Pierre à Bot. All asked after Agassiz with much interest. Excursions are planned for us when we return....

Dr. Gray enjoyed the visit to Geneva, where he renewed his friendship with MM. Alphonse De Candolle and Boissier, accomplishing some useful work, and having pleasant social meetings and excursions. He went to Chamouni and the Bernese Oberland; then to Munich, especially to meet again Martius, with whom he had been in constant correspondence, and who made the journey from Tyrol to greet his old friend. Their few days together were greatly enjoyed.

He returned to England, going down the Neckar by steamboat to Heidelberg, then down the Rhine, and through Holland, where he saw Miquel[9] in Amsterdam, rambling with him on a fête-day through the streets at evening, enjoying the queer sights; went to Leyden, meeting De Vriese,[10] with whom was R. Brown (then staying in Leyden for a few days), and seeing the Botanic Garden, one of the oldest in Europe, and well known to Linnæus. Blume[11] he missed, but he saw Siebold’s[12] collection of Japanese curios, then most rare. He took steamer from Rotterdam to London, and after a few days went down to Mr. Bentham’s, in Herefordshire.

Here were spent two months of very hard work with Mr. Bentham, who most kindly went over with him the plants of the United States Exploring Expedition, which had been brought over the Atlantic for the purpose.

Pontrilas is in a pretty, hilly country on the border of Wales, with many old churches, almost of Saxon time, in the neighborhood, to give interest to walks, and very interesting, agreeable neighbors for a day or two’s visiting, among them the authoress, Mrs. Archer Clive, who was very kind.

He left Pontrilas early in December to make a visit, at Dublin, to his friend Professor Harvey, to stay in the family of Mr. and Mrs. Todhunter, Dr. Harvey’s sister. Going on board the steamer at ten in the evening, he met with the severe accident of which he gives an account in his letters. Dr. Harvey came from Dublin to help in nursing him. His vigor and elasticity helped him to a speedy recovery, but it increased a general tendency to stoop, and he was never so erect afterwards.

He was able to get to Kew the last of December, and spent the winter in hard work in Sir William Hooker’s herbarium, which was then in his house at West Park.

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

Cumberland Place, Kew, December 28, 1850.

Your kind favor of December 6th, forwarded to me by Bentham, to Dublin, would have been sooner acknowledged, but that it found me an invalid. On our way from Hereford to Dublin I had just gone on board a steamer at Holyhead, early in the evening; had left Mrs. Gray in the ladies’ cabin, when, coming on deck again, I stepped over an open hatchway which had been left for the moment very carelessly unguarded and unlighted. I fell full eighteen feet, they say, to the bottom of the hold, striking partly on my right hand and the side of my right leg, bruising and straining both, but principally on my right side against a timber projecting from the floor, fracturing two of my ribs. It is truly wonderful that I was not more seriously and permanently injured. I was taken on shore at once and had good medical attendance. I recovered so rapidly that in a week I was comfortably taken across to Dublin, where I was kindly cared for by good friends; in two weeks more I left for London, able to walk without difficulty; and to-day, just four weeks after the accident, I have begun to work at plants again, in Sir William Hooker’s herbarium. But my side is still tender, and my strength is not great.

Having said thus much of my bodily condition, let me no longer delay to thank you heartily for the very unexpected compliment that you have caused to be paid me, and to ask you to convey, in fitting terms, my grateful acknowledgments to the Société de Physique et d’Histoire Naturelle, for the honor they have conferred upon me in choosing me as one of their corresponding members. I was not aware that I had rendered any particular services to your society, but I shall be very glad to do so if any opportunity offers. Although, generally, I am far from coveting compliments of this kind, I assure you I am much pleased to be thus associated with several valued personal friends, my contemporaries, and with such highly honored names of the past generation....

We had eight weeks of most pleasant and profitable labor at Pontrilas, and Mr. Bentham has rendered me invaluable assistance.

Mrs. Gray joins me in the expression of kind remembrances and regard to Madame De Candolle and yourself.

Believe me to remain, ever most sincerely yours,

Asa Gray.

Since Dr. Gray was so near Sir William, and working in the herbarium almost every day, there was much meeting of old friends, and of many of the men distinguished in botany. Robert Brown, with his keen observation and dry wit, he saw constantly at the British Museum, Dr. Wallich,[13] Mr. Miers and many others. There was some social visiting in London and the neighborhood. Mr. Abbott Lawrence was then American minister in London, and he and Mrs. Lawrence were very kind and attentive, giving him a chance to see at an evening reception some of the great men of the London world: the Duke of Wellington, Lady Morgan, Whewell the Master of Trinity, Lord Boughton, Lord Gough, and many others.

It was the year of the first great World’s Exhibition, and the building was then considered very wonderful. Through the kindness of Professor Lindley he was enabled to see it before it was completed.

There was a very charming visit to Oxford in March, where Dr. Gray made most delightful acquaintances. He there first met Dean Church, then a fellow of Oriel, who had him to dine. He also dined with Mr. Congreve[14] at Wadham; met Maskeleyne, who showed him “some fine talbotypes, which are a sort of daguerreotype on paper, and have a beautiful effect for landscapes and buildings.” Breakfasted with Mr. Burgon and Mr. Church, at Oriel, in Dr. Pusey’s old rooms, and met Mr. Burgon again at dinner, when dining in the “Common Room,” at a dinner given him by Mr. Church, and also Buckle and Sclater. Dr. Jacobson, then Regius professor of divinity, afterwards Bishop of Chester, and Mrs. Jacobson, were very kind. Dr. Daubeny was then professor of botany at Oxford, and there were some plants to look at in the small herbarium kept in the little Botanic Garden in an old greenhouse. The days were crowded with interesting sight-seeing and in meeting agreeable people.

From Oxford, Dr. Gray went to Cambridge, where he met again a traveling acquaintance made on the passage from Rotterdam, Dr. Thompson, then Greek tutor, later Master of Trinity, who was very kind in doing the honors of Trinity, King’s Chapel, etc. At his rooms, Dr. Gray met Professor Challis and other Cambridge men. The grounds about the colleges were then at their greatest beauty, the banks of the Cam yellow with primroses, the whole setting off the beautiful bridges and stately buildings. Another traveling acquaintance met in the street, recalling an experience on the Furca, asked Dr. Gray to dine with him at Caius College, saying his name was Mackenzie. He was Bishop Mackenzie, who died in south Africa.

On returning to Kew, Dr. Gray found Dr. Joseph Hooker, just back from his journey to the Himalayas and Thibet. Dr. Thompson[15] was also there, just home from India, where he had been imprisoned with Lady Sale and others, twenty of them in one small room, during the trouble in Afghanistan. And one day came an invitation to lunch from the Hookers’, “to meet Mr. Darwin, who is coming to meet Dr. Hooker; is distinguished as a naturalist.” “Mr. Darwin was a lively, agreeable person” [Mrs. Gray’s journal].

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

5 Cumberland Place, Kew, April 14, 1851.

For myself I am glad that I am perfectly recovered from the effects of my accident, and am as active as ever. I have passed a very pleasant winter, and have prosecuted my studies to great advantage, though there still remains, alas! more for me to do than I can hope to accomplish in the time that is still left for me. Your letter was just in time to reach me here; for we had just decided to go to Paris early next week; to remain there until the 1st of June, at least. The only drawback is that we thereby lose the society of Mr. and Mrs. Bentham, who mean to come to London early next month....

Sir William Hooker is not yet well, though better than he was last winter. I have presented your kind messages, for which he sends best thanks, and is rejoiced to hear of your recovery. Sir William is truly a noble man; the more intimately you know him the more strongly attached to him you become....

I had thought it quite likely that we might pass through Geneva again this summer; but that is not now possible. The sea, however, is not so broad as formerly. Believe me to remain,

Very faithfully and affectionately yours,
Asa Gray.

In April Dr. and Mrs. Gray went to Paris, where he worked busily through the mornings at the Jardin des Plantes, taking the afternoon for his sight-seeing. He met again his old friends, Jussieu, Decaisne, Gay, etc., and made the acquaintance of M. and Mme. Vilmorin, both most charming and interesting people; the former distinguished as a horticulturist, and both making investigations for many years on the varieties of strawberries, for which Mme. V. made all the drawings. Two separate days were passed at Verrières, their country home, an old villa belonging formerly to the Duchesse de la Vallière. And here to meet him came old Michaux[16] the younger, then eighty-one, who had walked from his home (fifteen leagues), for the pleasure of seeing Dr. Gray. And it was at Dr. Gray’s request that both Michaux and Jussieu sat for their daguerreotypes for him, the only satisfactory likenesses of either. Mr. François Delessert[17] extended pleasant hospitalities, and Mr. Webb was very kind and cordial.

It was during the time of the Republic, Louis Napoleon, president, and there were some grand fêtes in May, in honor of the Republic, at which the officers of the government were conspicuously absent.

Dr. Gray returned to Kew in June to continue his work, broken only by some days in London.

TO GEORGE BENTHAM.

Paris, April 30, 1851.

Dear Bentham,—I cannot give your message to Weddell, for he is on his way to the Peruvian cinchona forests, to remain a year,—I suppose on a commission from the manufacturers of quinine. Jussieu still suffers with some affection of the stomach, but is much better than last winter. Decaisne is quite well, but is occupied with the Culture, and is little in the herbarium, where Spach, Tulasne,[18] Naudin,[19] and Trécul[20] are in charge, under Brongniart and Jussieu. Webb is well, and so is Gay, who is quite happy, living on his half pay, which the Republic has secured to him, with his rooms free of rent, and some savings from his former income. I have not seen Gaudichaud yet; but he has offered to come and show me his Sandwich Island collections, etc., of which he has issued some plates, in “La Voyage de la Bonite,” but no text has appeared, and none seems likely to appear.

I gave to Dr. Alexander the list and notes on Fendler’s Chagres plants. He will hand it to you when he sees you in London.

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

Paris, May 6, 1851.

Robert Brown told me that Link would be succeeded in his excellent and lucrative professorship either by Grisebach[21] or by our excellent friend Braun. Since I have been here, a young man from Berlin says that the choice has fallen on Braun,—to my great joy, for I love Braun very much. I have given Lowell, who leaves Paris to-day, and will be in Germany in June and July, a letter to Braun, addressed to Giessen or Berlin.

Prince Paul’s sensitive branches of Mimosa catching unwary travelers is rich!

TO ——.

Wednesday morning, June 11.

Settled down to usual Kew routine; glad enough to get back to quiet and superlative neatness; to less elegance than our Parisian quarters, but decidedly more comfort. The only thing that distresses us is, that we cannot translate dear Mrs. Crook bodily to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sure we would if she were younger; but the dear old creature will now erelong be translated to a far better land.... Unpacked (which in interminableness is only second to packing up) and went down to the Hookers’....

Friday, after writing and dispatching letters home, we went up to London, shopped, etc., in the City; streets nasty (the English word is very appropriate; no wonder they always use it), and such a contrast to beautiful and gay Paris, which is vastly more convenient and agreeable for shopping....

Saturday, ... a little stroll in the Gardens, which are looking beautifully, the trees loaded with rich foliage, and the great masses of Rhododendrons in blossom.

In the evening went with Dr. Hooker up to the last soirée of Lord Rosse, the president of the Royal Society; too late to see Prince Albert, who came and went early; saw the usual dons. Sir Charles Lyell asked if I had stayed abroad all the time since last year, or had just come over afresh!...

Wednesday, we were off early in the morning, to make our first visit to the Great Exhibition. We went up to town by railroad as usual; walked over Waterloo bridge, and having reached the Strand, had the satisfaction of seeing nine omnibuses pass westward, all full. Despairing of all hope of getting into an omnibus, we were just turning to look for a cab, when a well-dressed and respectable woman, who had been making similar unsuccessful attempts, rushed up to us, exclaiming, “Oh! are you going to the Exhibition? Will you not take a cab with me? I have been trying for an omnibus in vain this half hour, and I have made an appointment with some friends there at half past ten.” We agreed at once to this reasonable and very convenient proposition, and we shared the expense accordingly, with many expressions of thanks on the lady’s part. Before we had reached within half a mile of the Crystal Palace we were obliged to fall into dense line, with a close double file of cabs, carriages, dog-carts, and other “vehicular conveyances,” all wending their way thither, a similar file of empty carriages returning on the other side of the street; the sidewalks as well as the roads inside the park all crowded with pedestrians. Early as we were, a vast number of people were already there, but scattered through the vast interior, they scarcely made a crowd, until midday, when the more attractive parts of the structure, the principal streets and squares, so to say, were thronged.

As to what we saw, is it not written at length in the great Official Catalogue (as far as that ponderous document is yet published), besides the Abridged Catalogue, in itself quite a sizable book, which we mean to bring home, with the Synopsis, and other things, quite a library, and I dare say you have heard and read quite enough about it. I doubt whether you have seen the excellent and spirited articles in the “Times,” beginning long before the building was finished, which give a most admirable and lively account of everything.

The general impression of the interior was not quite so imposing, did not give such an idea of the vastness, as when we saw it in April, less full, and the long spaces unbroken.

On our way down the nave, we stopped for a moment to see the Koh-i-noor, but the Mountain of Light looked to us little brighter than a piece of cut-glass. It does not come up to the general expectation. Manage it as they will, it does not shine at all wonderfully, and the people got it into their heads that the authorities were shamming them with a glass imitation instead of the veritable Koh-i-noor; an idea well expressed in “Punch,” who called it “the knave of diamonds.” We determined to show our patriotism by going first of all carefully through the American department, and quite a trial to one’s patriotism it is, a great space, very scantily filled with an ill-assorted, incongruous collection (although they have given up to Russia and France about one quarter of the space that Mr. Lawrence asked for and insisted upon having): one long shelf displayed only half a dozen wooden pails; another side was decorated with a miserable collection of cast-off specimens of autumn-leaves, and below with a case containing five or six dozen bottles of prepared magnesia, all just alike, flanked at the sides with a similar collection of Old Jacob Townsend’s Sarsaparilla, surmounted by a portrait of the illustrious inventor. The strength of the nation has gone to daguerreotypes, of which there are about two thousand very good specimens of the art, it must be said, far better than they can produce in England. The same may be said of many things, creditable in themselves, but of which they have filled up their space, or attempted to fill it, with an enormous number of specimens, where one or two would suffice. But wherever anything is quite poor and commonplace, the exhibitor is sure to make it up in brag, in which it must be confessed we do “beat all creation.”

Monday we went to the Zoölogical Gardens, very extensive, in fine keeping, the richest collection of living animals of all sorts in the world. Were very much amused with monkeys of all sorts and sizes, from those little larger than a rat to the great and sedate orang-outang,[22] just arrived, who is quite a human and a very respectable grave old fellow. We saw the hippopotamus, too, but he lay sleeping in the sun, and would give no sign of life except occasionally opening his eye and giving a wink. But one of the most amusing sights was the little suckling elephant, with its mother, and it was curious to see the little thing use its trunk as perfectly and knowingly as its mother.... We stayed to see the ferocious animals fed, at half past four, no great sight, as they behaved extremely proper, and then we hurried back to the station and came home to Kew.

A short visit to the British Museum, which is an immense collection of objects of natural history, sculpture, books, antiquities, etc., etc. Had some botanical work in the herbarium there (the British Museum), but did not do anything that day, for we spent the time talking to Mr. Brown, who was in quite a chatty mood. He is a singular-looking man, with a very heavy lower lip and jaw, and generally carries his head down; but it is curious to watch him, and see how he kindles up, and what a satirical twinkle comes in the corner of his eyes when he tells some story, for he has a good deal of satire.

Dr. Gray went to the meeting of the British Association at Ipswich, where Prince Albert came for a few days. Dr. Hooker and Dr. Harvey (who had been making a visit at Kew), and other scientific friends, were there. Among other discussions in one of the sections was one on the possibility of a railroad to the Pacific, a paper by Asa Whitney, “which had been brought before the Geographical Society in London, and reported on favorably.”

From Ipswich he made a most interesting visit to Lady Hooker’s father, Dawson Turner, seeing his very valuable collections, autographs, pictures, etc., and returning to Kew to work until breaking up to go back to America. A short trip was made in Ireland, and Dr. Gray went to Pontrilas to say goodby to Mr. and Mrs. Bentham, immediately before the voyage. Dr. and Mrs. Gray were again at home, September 4.

After Dr. Gray’s return from Europe, his busy life went on, filled with college work and the care of the Garden as accompaniments to a study of the new collections constantly coming in, the work on the Exploring Expedition, the keeping his various botanical text-books in their new editions up with the advancing science, and his always large correspondence. His letters were chiefly on the questions upon which he was working, but with many touches on events of interest of the day, and little playful turns. He says in a letter to Dr. Engelmann, “I well know I have too many irons in the fire.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Darwin destroyed all the letters he received before 1862, except the one published in his “Life and Letters,” which is inserted later, as well as one to Sir Joseph Hooker taken from the same volume. The rest of those to Sir Joseph are mostly bound up in the botanical correspondence at Kew.

Dr. Gray was an immense worker. After his morning mail was received and looked over, that he might answer any imperative questions, he took daylight for his scientific work, and, with pauses for meals, and the necessary interruptions that came at times, he kept steadily on all the day. He wrote his letters and his elementary botanical works mostly in the evening. But in his younger days his eyes were unusually strong, and he would work with the microscope by lamp-light as readily as by daylight.

Though a steady and unwearying worker he was not rapid. He would throw aside sheet after sheet to be rewritten, especially if there was anything he wished to make particularly clear and strong, or any reasoning to be worked out from the soundest point of view. It was always a wonder to those about him that he could stand as he did the unceasing labor, but he was a sound sleeper even if the hours might be short, and of a vigorous, wiry, active temperament, and when he did take a holiday, he took it heartily. His rest and recreation were in journeys, longer or shorter, and every two or three years some long outing would be taken, to give him the needed refreshment. But he must always be busy even then, somewhere to go, something to see; rest in quiet seemed impossible to him for more than a day at a time.

TO CHARLES WRIGHT.

Cambridge, January 23, 1852.

I am printing on “Plantæ Wrightianæ,” the first part of which (as I work in so much general matter, especially Tex-Mexican), to the end of Compositæ, will take 225 pages or more, with ten plates,—the most important memoir I ever wrote, and will indelibly fix our name on the Texan-New-Mexican Flora....

I have just found a letter of Sullivant’s, dated May 27, 1850, in which he says, “Send me by all means Wright’s Texan Mosses and Hepaticæ....”

Poor fellow! as I wrote you before, he lost his wife while I was away, and was overwhelmed, as she was everything to him, and as good a muscologist almost as he....

You are in a fine field. Hold on and keep a good heart. I long to see what Colonel Graham is now bringing on to me....

June 5.

There, my dear Wright, I consider myself very much of a gentleman! For your favor of the 12th April reached me only this afternoon, and now before the sun has gone down I am answering it! Your letter came very opportunely too. For, though Colonel Graham has been back so long, it was only yesterday that I got the collection he brought home with him to Indianola (and the seeds); and to-day I opened it and had looked over only two bundles. And I was saying to myself, Now if I only had Mr. Wright’s list with localities, I should do very well. And when my letters came from the office, yours, with said list inclosed, was among them. The plants look well, but I have only peeped into them yet. I am glad if you have found Amoreuxia malvafolia, but I have not yet hit upon it....

I am still very busy with college work, for a month longer, and with the Garden; and the Exploring Expedition work has been pressing me, and still will. But I shall somehow distribute your 1851 collection very soon, name them up to the end of Compositæ, and in the course of the summer determine many of the monopetalous families. I have already named and described a few of these and some Apetalæ to please Colonel Graham, and named a new Pentstemon after him (which I have growing, too), which compliment seems to gratify him.

By this time you will have received the index and plates of “Plantæ Wrightianæ.” Copies are already in England, and I am about to dispatch many to France, Germany, etc.

You are indeed an invaluable collector, though you do like to grumble now and then, and I hope the Indians won’t catch you. If they must take a scalp or a head, there are others I could better spare. So take care of yourself....

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

February 23, 1852.

I carefully keep your flowering bit of Fendlera, ready to return it if Lindheimer does not get more, as I trust he will. It is the most interesting of North American genera, between Deutzia and Philadelphus, and shows plainly that both are saxifragaceous....

July 28.

I am worked almost to distraction. But college work is now over and I can get on with fewer irons in the fire.

I fear you are driven up hard also, by the sickly season and cholera. I hope you may be able to give up practice by and by....

I have had for a good while a misunderstanding with Captain Wilkes about my work for the Exploring Expedition botany. It is now made up, I think, or nearly, but I have had no pay from them for a long time, and they are a year behind in paying. I have got manuscript of several families all ready for the press, and some fine drawings. I am just now working up “Plantæ Wrightianæ,” 1851 collection, up to end of Compositæ, old stopping-place, but must dash beyond that soon....

TO W. J. HOOKER.

Cambridge, December 4, 1852.

Here is a discovery! I have to-day received by post from Dr. J. F. Beaumont, of Mountain Home, in the upper part of Alabama, specimens of a Trichomanes, which he finds growing there under shelving rocks. I send you herewith the half of what is sent me, knowing you will be much interested in the discovery, for the first time, of a Trichomanes in the United States; and thinking that you will probably pronounce it to be a form of the T. radicans, though so much smaller than my Irish and West Indian specimens.... I have not specimens enough of T. radicans to satisfy myself entirely, and refer the question to your experienced judgment. Pray give me your opinion, for the addition of a single species to our few ferns, and especially one of this group, is a matter of moment to us, and worthy of a published notice.

I should not be so greatly surprised now if Hymenophyllum ciliatum, credited by Willdenow to Virginia, should turn up, but I still think there was some mistake about that; and I could find no specimen in Willdenow’s herbarium when I sought for it, in 1839....

Next Wednesday’s steamer, which takes this letter, will also take, for a short European tour, my good father-in-law, Mr. Loring, with Mrs. Loring, and Mrs. Gray’s brother Charles. A rather sudden determination, but we have strongly urged the journey ever since the death of their dear little boy, the little Benjamin, who seemed given to be the comfort and stay of their declining years, who was born just before our return home, a year ago last summer. The rest and change are needful to Mr. Loring, also, from being worn down by his long-continued labors at the bar, of which he is perhaps the leader in Boston; I am confident it will be of great benefit to him; and the Old World has much to interest a man of his refined taste.... And then Kew Garden is to them one of the wonders of the world, as well as a place with which they have, through us, so many pleasant associations. Should you wish them to enjoy the privilege of seeing the Gardens under your own kind auspices, would you notify Mr. Loring through Boott (for I do not now know what will be their London address), of a day that would be agreeable and convenient to yourself....

January 4, 1853.

Wright will now soon be off in Ringgold’s North Pacific Surveying Expedition, to explore Behring Straits, Kurile Islands, the coast of Japan, if possible, and to winter at the Sandwich Islands.

So we shall have no more New Mexican plants from him.

My new memoir, “Plantæ Wrightianæ,” is now almost all printed, and contains many novelties. I never had a collection so rich in entirely new things.

I long to hear what you will say of the Trichomanes from Alabama which I sent you.

With best wishes for the new year to you and all yours, I remain,

Yours affectionately,
Asa Gray.

January 28, 1853.

“It never rains but it pours” is an old adage suitable to this meridian and illustrated by what I now send you, namely, a second Trichomanes from Alabama! discovered by the indefatigable Thomas M. Peters, Esq., of Moulton, who (and not Mr. Beaumont, it appears) was the first finder of Trichomanes radicans in Alabama.

This one seems to me clearly a new one....

I think it particularly appropriate in this case that it should bear the name of its discoverer, so I have called it Trichomanes Petersii, and have sent a little article on it and Trichomanes radicans to “Silliman’s Journal.” ...

In 1853 began Dr. Gray’s long correspondence with the Dean of St. Paul’s—a friendship whose intimacy was ever increasing and which lasted through his life.

TO R. W. CHURCH.

February 7, 1853.

My dear Mr. Church,—Since I heard, which I did first from Mr. Clough,[23] that you were about to marry and take charge of a parish, I have been longing every time I wrote to England to add a line expressing my most sincere congratulations. I hope you will not think me too presuming if I make bold to do so, and if I ask you where your parish is, for I would gladly form some idea of where your home is to be. Pleasant and desirable on many accounts as an Oxford life must be, yet I cannot but think you more appropriately placed in the pleasant parsonage I can fancy, the centre of a little world of your own, and the spiritual guide of an attached body of parishioners, where you will be very happy and very useful.

Still let us hope that the visit to Cambridge, New England, is only deferred, to afford us a double gratification. I think you can sometimes leave your parish for three months, or even more with special leave, and the voyage is becoming shorter and cheaper every year.

I have looked through the “Times,” which I see regularly through the kindness of a friend, thinking that I might perchance see your appointment, presentation, or whatever it may be, mentioned; but in vain.

By the way, I am glad to see that you have elected Mr. Gladstone. Your name on the Oxford Committee makes me suppose you have not yet left Oxford.

Dr. Albro has returned in restored health, and speaks with much gratification of his visit to Oxford, only regretting that your absence prevented his making your acquaintance until the last moment of his short stay.

Mr. Clough brought me a letter from Maskelyne of Wadham College. Circumstances, I am sorry to say, have yet prevented me from seeing him here as much as I could wish. I hope soon to know him better. He has excellent and influential acquaintances; but one hardly sees what he is to do.

If he holds Unitarian views, as I have been told, he will perhaps be more favorably situated, just in Boston or Cambridge, than in England, and probably meet more cultivated and more religious people of that persuasion than at home. But if he sympathizes rather with Francis Newman and that school, as some one tells me, I should think he would not find that class of people here very attractive to him. But I hope that is not his bent. I have no partiality for Unitarianism, though it is the faith of near and valued friends. I am an orthodox Presbyterian, as my fathers were. But in England I should be a Churchman, although a pretty low one, at least in some respects; and I am a most hearty well-wisher to the Church of England. So pray, when settled in your parish, just drop me a line to say where you are, and how old your parish church is; for hankering after antiquities is, as an Oxford man told me, a great failing of Americans.

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

Cambridge, March 28, 1853.

My dear Friend,—I am all the more glad that I can direct your attention to the fourth volume (new series) of the “Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,” p. 382, where you will find your name enrolled as the sole Honorary Member for Switzerland.

Ordinarily neither you nor I would be at all solicitous for such recognition. I care not to have them except where (as in the Linnæan Society of London, the French Academy, and your own society of Geneva) I well know the nominations are strictly and conscientiously weighed, and where the list to be filled is a limited one. But we here prize the name of De Candolle so highly that we count it a privilege to have it on our foreign list....

I should state that this academy, the oldest but one in America, was in a state of inactivity and hebetude since the death of its former president, Bowditch, till 1843, the year after I came to Cambridge, when it was determined, chiefly by some of my colleagues in Cambridge, to restore it to life and vigor. It is now full of life. The number of its foreign members is now limited to seventy-five, and they are chosen by a very formal process and a very rigid scrutiny, so as to have only the very best names in the several departments of knowledge. Formerly they were chosen without such care; so that there are names on the list that could not be placed there now. Hereafter the list will be a most select one....

Hereafter we will send our parcels through the Smithsonian Institution and through its agent, Mr. Hector Bossange, Paris. You justly praise the publications of this institution. It is on the point of issuing another splendid volume; and at least one a year will continue to be issued.[24]

Liberal in its distribution, the Smithsonian Institution looks to its exchanges as a means of building up a library valuable for scientific researches in this country. You may remember that, when at Geneva, I ventured to ask you to recommend to the Société de Physique et d’Histoire Naturelle de Genève, to vote its series of memoirs to the Smithsonian Institution. But you thought it would not then be quite proper to request it. Now that the institution has given such evidences of its vigor and productiveness, and that I can assure you it is only beginning to do its work, and that in number of volumes it will soon overtake you, I venture to renew the request which I was then requested to make; and I think that your society, with these assurances, and in view of the good offices of the Smithsonian in promoting interchanges (at no small expense), would freely accord the earlier volumes of its memoirs, on your proposition....

Dr. Harris[25] has made interesting researches on the plants cultivated by our aborigines, which I urge him to publish; but he is one of those persons who are never quite ready to print as long as they live.

I have long suspected that Helianthus tuberosus came from North America. I should like to study from what indigenous species it comes....

As to the “Botany of the South Sea Exploring Expedition,” the manuscript and the drawings are ready up nearly to the Leguminosæ; and the printing, which is not under my control, is about to commence. The work will probably make three quarto volumes and 300 folio plates. I shall be sure to have a copy to send you. As to the specimens, there are few duplicates; and of these I am not myself allowed to retain any. Possibly, hereafter, some may be awarded to me. That expedition did not land on the high Antarctic coasts it saw, and therefore made no collections there. Its Antarctic collection is all from Orange Harbor, Tierra del Fuego, and has little that is new.

The most interesting part of the collection was made at the Sandwich and Feejee islands.

My wife and I well remember what a charming place Vallon is, and retain pleasant memories of our trip to the Salève under the charge of Madame De Candolle, despite the bad weather which spoiled the view. We should delight to revisit Switzerland. Having no children, it is not impossible that we may do so; but the time, I fear, is far in the future....

I have written a much longer letter than I had intended when I began.

Believe me to remain, yours very faithfully,

Asa Gray.

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

Cambridge, July 14, 1853.

My dear Engelmann,—This cover has been addressed to you for a long while, but I have delayed to fill and close it, not so much because you had not written, for I knew you must be very busy now, but because the convenient time has not exactly come. For I have been very busy. College work done up only last week; printing of “Exploring Expedition Botany,” in which I have read proofs up to 220 pages, and gave to-night finished manuscript (except a few crooked points to settle in a family or two) up to the end of Rosaceæ (which will make about 450 pages. It fills up fast with the open pages adopted in these reports). I shall carry on the volume to 550 or 650 pages, and the plates folio, already 56, shall carry up to 100, if I can. There is next some tough work in Myrtaceæ and Melastomaceæ; but as to the latter Naudin has much cleared the way. Those done, and I think I may venture to work part of the time on the Lindheimer, Fendler, and Wright Monopetalæ.

Agassiz returned most delighted with his visit to you, and we talked much of you....

I am afraid to touch Gregg’s Mexican plants, for fear of the time they would consume. In “Exploring Expedition,” I branch out little or none, except a few notes in Malvaceæ, and probably more in Compositæ.

If I could do the work abroad, I could work up collateral things most advantageously; but the means here at disposal are too poor.

Still, you will be pleased with my volume i. when I finish and send it to you (the letterpress this fall!).

No specimens scarcely of Cactaceæ in collection Exploring Expedition,—a drawing or two. I shall send them on to you presently....

I grieve to tell you that Adrien de Jussieu is dead. Cancer in the stomach, his tedious malady proves to have been. It makes a deep impression on the scientific men, and the public, too, in Paris. He was much my most intimate correspondent in France, a true friend, and a charming man.

You know, perhaps, that Moquin-Tandon has succeeded the late Achille Richard at L’Ecole de Médecine. Tulasne, I suppose, will be the new professor at the Jardin des Plantes; at least he ought to be, as he is the most able man.

No farther news since my last.

Agassiz looks poorly and says he is not well....

I never could get Fouquiera up. To-day I have sown some seeds, and put on my own table, by the window, to watch....

18th August.

Agassiz handed me your note about the Compass plant. I took him at once into the Garden, to see Silphium laciniatum, terebinthinaceum, and pinnatifidum.

He agreed there was no direction to be made out, one way more than another. The cauline leaves all tend to become vertical (as in several other Compositæ), but present neither face nor edge north.

But three years ago Lapham of Wisconsin wrote me that, though the plant near Milwaukee showed no “polarity” (and so he never believed in it), yet on going farther west, on the prairies, he found it did generally turn all to the north there.

If I remember aright, though, he said the surfaces of the leaf look north and south. You say the edges? How is this? Compare notes with Lapham....

What do you think I am about now? Revising genera of Myrtaceæ for Exploring Expedition collection.

In these exotic orders I frequently find the genera so at loose ends that I cannot make the plants of our collection lie comfortably till I have given the genera a good shaking up. I should be tempted to do much more of this if I could work at Hooker’s, or in Paris. It is quite as well not, as it would cost no end of time....

I have found some Fouquiera seedlings up in the Garden. I am right about it; not Torrey. The leaf is not axillary and its petiole inclosed in the spine; but the spine is a hardened inferior portion of the petiole that persists, and from which the rest falls away clean....

TO W. J. HOOKER.

Cambridge, August 3, 1853.

My dear Sir William,—I will endeavor to get some account of Shakerdom for you. They are a queer people indeed.

Manilla paper[26] is made of old manilla rope, which is largely used by our shipping. But what plant yields the manilla hemp for this cordage I have not the means of knowing, that is, whether the Musa textilis or no. I have been promised specimens of the stem of the plant, etc. But the climate makes our countrymen indolent there, and forgetful. I will ask for statistics as to the paper manufacture....

I shall be pleased to have you figure as many of our ferns as you can; and pray give names to all new species without hesitation. They will be more fitly named by the describer than by any one else.

I note with satisfaction what you write about genera of ferns. This pushing a single character (as venation) without regard to consequences, and giving it the same importance when it does not accord with habit as when it does, is the fault of most botanologists who restrict their view to one subject or one idea only. I am glad that you will carefully revise the genera on your own judgment.

By the way, the fern I sent you last spring, and which you called Asplenium montanum, Willd. (a species I used to know well), struck the collector (Beaumont), as it did me, to be different. Pray collate, and perhaps figure it, as well as the ordinary A. montanum.

I was grieved to hear of the death of Adr. de Jussieu, with whom I have had a very pleasant correspondence for the last three years, and to whom I was attached as to no other Frenchman. His late letters were so cheerful and lively, and even hopeful, that the news of his death took me by surprise, notwithstanding the steady failure of his health for a long while....

We remember with interest that dear Harvey sets out to-morrow on his long voyage.

TO R. W. CHURCH.

Christmas Eve, 1853.

My dear Mr. Church,—It is a good time to remember old friends and to bring up, as well as one may, arrears of neglected duty. I have long unaccountably neglected to acknowledge your letter of the 24th August, and to thank you most heartily for the interesting volume of your collected reviews, which reached me a little earlier (I know not how it was so long delayed between New York and Cambridge), and which I have received and read with much pleasure, that is, all I have yet read. For I am saving the article on Dante for my first leisure hour. The first I read was the article on Pascal and Ultramontanism, of which I greatly admire the delicate and thorough handling.

I wish I could send you something of any interest. But I am not well enough satisfied with the elementary work which I use as a text-book for my lower classes to offer it; and besides that I have published, since last in England, only memoirs of the botany of our new western regions, one volume of the botany of a Government South Sea Expedition, etc., all dreadfully dry and technical.

I have been unusually busy this year, and am just now especially so, having to complete the preparation of nine lectures on Vegetation, which I am to give before the Smithsonian Institution at Washington next month.

I do not much fancy popular lecturing, and do this only to please a very valued friend, Professor Henry, the secretary of this institution. This over, I shall return to my regular plodding work at home, with great satisfaction.

I do not wonder that you feel a little nervous about the result of the experiment at Oxford. I can well understand it, and if I were an Oxford man, which I should count it a high honor to have been, I should share the feeling. I count it an excellent thing that the new enactments were framed by friendly hands, and are not very sweeping. As far as I can judge from the election of the present council, those of the Movement party by no means have it all their own way.

It seems to me that the admission of Dissenters to the A. B. degree is a wise measure, and one that will do no harm to the university nor the church. But I see not how they can go further. It would not be right that they should pass to the A. M. and share in the government of the university.

Any position at Oxford or Cambridge which allows of matrimony must be a desirable one for a person of scholarly pursuits. I can hardly think you will pass your life at Whatley, but trust you will have some better preferment and a wider field of duty before long, before Mrs. Gray and myself will be likely to pay you the visit you kindly solicit, for I see no near prospect of our revisiting England, though nothing would please us more....

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

7th December, 1853.

I got dreadfully behindhand with everything. “Exploring Expedition Botany” stopped printing for a long time, but is now renewed; three hundred or more pages are printed, and copy sent to printer up to Leguminosæ (excl.). Meanwhile, to look over Brackenridge’s manuscript of the Filices, to turn a loose ungrammatical lingo into English, and his English characters into Latin, is a tedious job; then to read his proofs is another. But if I did not do all this, very bad work indeed would be made of it. Late in October Mrs. Gray and I went to New York for a week, to visit Torrey and to see the New York Exhibition. Returning, I had to bear my part in a course of lectures, which the American Academy gave to the public (to replenish our publication funds); and to prepare and deliver my two lectures, on the relations of plants to the sun, cost me almost the whole of November.

Sprague is too slow, and too feeble in health, to do half what I want done, let alone others. I must import an additional draughtsman. If you know any in Germany good enough, who would come out, let me know at once. If not, I must try at Paris....

TO CHARLES WRIGHT.

May 21, 1853.

The Kurile Islands will be a fine field; and I hope you can do much among them. Collect some specimens of everything you see there....

Cambridge, February 19, 1854.

Sinner that I am, I have four letters of yours unanswered; the last from Simon’s Bay, November 4th. The fact is I do not find time to write half the letters I ought, and those, like yours, which are not to be dispatched on some particular day, I am sure to postpone and neglect interminably. It seems so vague, too, to be writing to a man, you know not where, somewhere on the other side of the world, and you know not when the epistle may reach him, say six months hence.

Nor is it easy to reflect and remember what I have been doing, so as to tell you....

I forgot to tell you, too, that Thurber[27] called on me and offered his plants collected under Bartlett. I have written out the greater part up to the end of Compositæ, my old sticking-place, a number of new things, mostly from deeper down in Sonora than you went, and in southwest California. Beyond doubt Torrey will work up a part. I shall merely furnish characters and botanical remarks to Thurber, and let him do all the rest of the talk. Bartlett is still in hopes that the Senate will print a great report for him. I greatly doubt if they do. If so, Thurber’s botany will go as an appendix. If not, he will make a memoir of the things up to Compositæ, and the striking things beyond, and afterwards I may lick up the rest in the general continuation of “Plantæ Wrightianæ,” etc.

Meanwhile the United States minister at Mexico has been making a treaty, now before our Senate, for buying a further slice of Chihuahua and Sonora, to take in Lake Guzman and the Sonora country some way south of where you went, that is, below San Pedro. So there will have to be a new survey if this treaty is ratified, and a chance of more botany. I wish you were to be here to attend to it; only you have already taken off the cream of that country, and can now do more, and find more novelty, in some of the countries you are going to.

From Governor Stevens’s party, from Minnesota to Washington Territory, north of Oregon, bundles of plants are sent home to Baird and by him forwarded to me. Wretched specimens, and nothing new among them!...

Captains at sea are very apt to get a little crusty, which should be minded just as little as possible. I expect to hear that, after getting well settled and at home in the Vincennes, you find yourself comfortable and all pleasant. Gentlemanly conduct and devotion to one’s pursuits will at length make one respected, anywhere.

When you return, I trust you will yourself prepare the botanical report of your cruise. I hope so, for your own sake, both scientifically and because your doing so will keep you on pay some years longer on shore. I will aid you, if I live, most willingly over knotty points, etc.; perhaps would like to do certain families further than that; not, if you will take hold of it yourself, as you ought to do.

I suppose you will have found nothing new at the Cape, though the vegetation there must have been novel to you. It will be pleasant, in the long cruises, to study yourself the plants collected at the last port. Did you get any nice Algæ? Look out for them hereafter.

When you are on surveying-ground, you may probably be transferred back to the steamer again.

Presently your letters will be coming to me via California. I hope to continue to hear such good accounts of your health and activity. Do not measure my interest in your letters by the number I myself write, though I mean to write oftener in future. No news here, scientific or other. Mr. Carey, you know, has gone back to England to live, and has married a young wife there, moreover.

TO W. J. HOOKER.

Cambridge, March 28, 1854.

I send a glass bottle filled with the pulp and seed of Cereus giganteus as gathered by the natives, and used for food, the same as what I formerly sent you a small quantity of in a letter, trusting the seeds would grow, as they are not subjected to heat in making this jam.

I have some pieces of the wood of the great Wellingtonia tree, which I estimate to be not older probably than the Christian era. Torrey has no fruit, nor have I; but there are some cones in Philadelphia. The wood is very like that of the red-wood, i. e., Taxodium sempervirens. I hope we shall get the male flowers, but I have no correspondent in California, and Torrey no very good or energetic ones.

How hard it is to believe that there is a European war! I trust it will be short. Some of our own people are behaving very badly about Cuba, but it is mostly talk for effect, and will lead to nothing, we hope.

TO GEORGE THURBER.

Cambridge, 20th April, 1854.

Dear Thurber,—When yours of the 17th arrived, and till now, I have been too much absorbed in college duties to consider it, as I now rapidly will.

Ranunculus 441. I never liked naming a plant after a person who has had nothing to do with it, as collector, describer, and nothing else; therefore do not like R. Huntiana. We will wait for some other mode of complimenting Mr. Hunt. Moreover, I have hit on a name which pleases me tolerably, viz., R. hydrocharoides, which, by your leave, we will adopt.

Thurberia specific name? That is a question to consider, and no very pat name at once applicable both to the species and the discoverer occurs to me.

“Thurberia palmata” might pass, and would anglicize into “the handy Thurber,” but then the hand has only three fingers.

“T. tridactyla” would meet this; but only birds are tridactylous; besides, the uppermost leaves are entire.

Taking another tack, from its smoothness, we might say, T. glabra or T. lævis; or, as I believe you have not a strong beard, T. imberbis. But, on the whole, perhaps it would be as well to indicate merely the nearest affinity of the genus, and call it “Thurberia thespesioides,” as it is nearest Thespesia. Take your choice, though, of any of the above, to which add “T. rosea,” if the color of the flower warrants that name.

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

Cambridge, June 1, 1854.

My dear Friend,—It was with great pleasure that I received from you, two days ago, your letter of the 2d May. I counted myself your debtor, although, indeed, my last letter of 18th October is of later date than yours of the 1st October, which it crossed on the ocean, and I was only waiting until I could announce a small envoi to you, namely, that of a copy of the 1st volume of the “Botany of the United States Exploring Expedition in the South Seas,” which has been more than a year in printing. This 4th volume (777 pages) is at length happily printed off, and just in time, too, for sending you a copy (unbound, direct from the printing-office at Philadelphia) in the annual envoi of the Smithsonian Institution.

The atlas, of 100 plates in folio, which should accompany this volume, is by no means ready, owing to the slowness as well as the feeble health of the artist, Mr. Sprague; perhaps, even, it may not reach you before next year, by the same mode of conveyance.

I have now, indeed, some hopes that the “Flora of North America” may soon be carried through the Gamopetalæ, I elaborating at the same time, in a general memoir, the Gamopetalæ of Wright’s, Fendler’s, and Lindheimer’s collections in continuation; a pretty formidable matter!

In a separate small parcel you will find (in the Smithsonian envoi) some brochures for you.... Among them is a short article in “Silliman’s Journal,” accompanying a reprint of a great part of Dr. Hooker’s Introductory Essay to the “Flora of New Zealand.” Agassiz here is committed to the view opposite to Hooker’s, in an equally extreme form. I wished to interpose some criticisms to both views, but had only time to touch briefly on one or two points. I wait with impatience for your work on “Géographie Botanique,” expecting very much from it, from your great ability, long study of the subject, and fairness of mind. Indeed, I was daily expecting to learn that it was published; and now you tell me that the printing is barely begun; the “Prodromus,” volume 14, not yet begun! But I am one of the last persons who ought to complain of delay in execution....

From the family of the late M. de Jussieu, you should receive a copy of the “Epistolæ Linnæano-Jussieuanæ,” with our late friend’s notes, etc., the last scientific work of his too short life.[28] I intended to send you a copy myself, but at the request of M. Ramond I surrendered the small extra edition to his charge for distribution. In due time you will have a copy in the volume of the “Memoirs of the American Academy” also. My daguerreotype of M. Jussieu was most opportunely taken. His family, having no recent portrait, have solicited the loan of it, to aid in the preparation of an engraved likeness; and I have placed it in their hands.

I delayed the last sheet of the “Correspondence” long, awaiting an answer to my request for some materials (notices, éloges, etc.), from which I could prepare something of a biographical nature to append, but I received nothing, at least until too late. In the May number of the “Kew Journal of Botany,” Hooker has reprinted my brief note; but by some accident, the marks of quotation are omitted from the two last paragraphs, which appear as if written by the editor of the “Journal.” ...

Believe me to remain, my dear friend and honored colleague, as ever, your sincerely attached,

Asa Gray.

TO W. J. HOOKER.

Cambridge, February 5, 1855.

My dear Sir William,—The inclosed, from our good friend Dr. Short,[29] and the box it advises, came while I was at Washington, from which I have just returned. Mrs. Gray and I have enjoyed our month’s holiday very much; though I was kept busy enough, having to deliver nine lectures in three weeks. We had arranged to have a few days at New York, in which I could work with Dr. Torrey; but the good man was called off to Washington on business just as I left that place, and we crossed en route, and I came on home, in consequence....

I am very glad Mr. Smith was pleased with the live plants I sent. Please remind him that I should like to share in the distribution of seeds this spring. And if I find time to make out a short list, I may ask for some live plants again....

I have a Cereus giganteus six inches high, and I saw several others. They have no hair, and appear very unlike C. senilis....

There is an authentic account in some numbers of “Silliman’s Journal” last year of the size of that prostrate trunk (Wellingtonia-Washingtonia).

Mr. Blake, at Washington, told me something of it, but I forget the numbers. I will ask him, as he is a reliable person. But 450 feet is rather too tall.

So they would talk about the tree that was felled being 3,000 years old (and took in Lindley), whereas it was not quite 1,300! It appears to grow much faster than S. sempervirens.[30] ...

A great loss in Forbes’s death. I have been trembling lest I should hear that Dr. Hooker is chosen to the chair at Edinburgh, which would give him very good pay, I suppose, and he would fill the place well, but it would take him away from special botany, which would be a great pity....

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

May 29, 1855.

The class which leaves college this summer have bespoken photographic likenesses, on paper, of their professors,—my colleagues and myself,—and this gives me an opportunity of obtaining from the artist some duplicate copies of that for which I sat, and which Mrs. Gray pronounces a very good likeness.

It is not so much vanity that induces me to ask you to accept of the copy I inclose, as the hope of getting yours in return, if that same style be adopted in Geneva, and be as little expensive as here,—to add to the already considerable number of portraits of botanists which make the chief adornment of my rooms,—among which the fine engraving of your distinguished father is conspicuous. I need not say that I should be glad to place the likeness of the son near to that of the father. Ever, my dear De Candolle,

Your sincere and faithful,
Asa Gray.

TO CHARLES WRIGHT.

August 28, 1855.

For a long while now I have been waiting for a good evening when I was not too tired to write you a long letter to meet you in California, in return, though a poor return, for your several nice letters from China.

It is now time my letter was off,—when lo and behold!—

Yesterday morning I was sitting here busy with steady work and not expecting much interruption; now, this evening, my passage is taken, my trunk packed, I am hurriedly closing up affairs, and to-morrow morning go on board steamer America and sail for Liverpool. I have to go and look after my brother-in-law, who is sick in Paris of a fever. No one of the family can go but me, and I manage to find the time. Mr. Loring pays the traveling charges, and off I go, to be gone, however, not over two months, perhaps not so long; a week in Paris, another at Kew, a few days more in England; this must repay me (besides the consciousness of having done my duty) for some twenty odd days of discomfort at sea!

What have I been doing of late? Not much accomplished, i. e., published. Of my “Plantæ Novæ Thurberianæ” and “Notes on Vavæa and Rhytidandra” I have sent you copies already, but I will send you more.

A useful article on the Smithsonian Institution, in July number of “Silliman,” probably you have seen in the “Journal;” never mind, I send you a separate copy by mail. Some critical notices which I have no copies of.

What I am about doing, I can always talk largely of. I am preparing a new edition of the “Manual of Botany of the Northern United States,” and a new elementary work[31] of a familiar character, to go with it, separate and with original pictures on wood by Sprague, and I am to finish the “Flora” volume and “Plantæ Wrightianæ” with it. I have determined Berlandier’s plants up to end of Compositæ. Also I have done, along with Torrey, the botany of several expeditions across the continent for railroad surveys, which are soon to be published. Work goes slowly and I grow old. This little holiday will not be a bad thing for me, though it puts me back a little.

TO W. J. HOOKER.

Cambridge, October 23, 1855.

Now that I am quietly settled at home again, my episode seems almost like a dream,—a very pleasant one, however, since it gave me the pleasure of seeing once more some most valued and near friends. I was absent only six weeks and one day, of which twenty-two days were passed upon the water.

I found all well here on my return, but I was deeply grieved to learn the news of our beloved friend Dr. Torrey’s bereavement. It was about a month ago that the companion of his life, almost from his youth, was removed to a better world, after an illness of only a few days.... She was one of the most actively good, self-denying persons I ever knew. There are many to mourn at her departure out of her own family, especially among the poor and the distressed.... She was one of my earliest and best friends, one to whom I owe more than to almost any person; and I feel the loss as I should that of a near and dear relative.

I wrote you a line, with some inclosures, while at sea, and posted it at Halifax, N. S....

When I send the package from Holton,[32] I wish also to send you live seedlings of a palm from Sonora, Mexico, raised from seeds gathered by Thurber, and one or two other things.

I do not forget the large “cypress knees” I promised, which will be rather striking in your famous museum, and I look out for an opportunity to send by sailing vessel direct to London.

Remember me affectionately to Lady Hooker (for whom Mrs. Gray incloses a few lines) and most cordially to Mr. Bentham, who so kindly came down from the country to give me the opportunity of seeing him, for which I am greatly obliged.

P. S.—I forgot to tell you that, by the hands of Hon. Miss Murray (who returns to England by this week’s steamer), I send you the September number of “Silliman’s Journal.” Should she forget to send it to you, please remind her when she comes to Kew, as assuredly she will, to talk about her Florida new fern. I have filled up the Ward case which she brought over, also a box of American plants which she takes, I suppose, for Mr. Fox Strangways. Her various boxes and packages will nearly fill the ship, I should think.

Miss Murray is a most lively, most active person, has traveled widely through the country, and traversed rough places, such as no other woman past sixty ever did. She has seen a great deal, but heard very little, I should think, as she talks incessantly, and in a lively, interesting way, too.

You will not be disappointed by the suppression of her manuscript by her English friends, I suppose, for she is fully determined to rush into print, to print her journal just as it was written from day to day; for she now feels she has a mission to rescue the South from the obloquy and wrong heaped upon it by us of the North, and by England. Save the mark!

At any rate, her journal will be piquant.

I am anxious to know how far we can economically use the post for the transmission of printed matter. Perhaps I could safely send you “Silliman’s Journal” in this way. As an experiment I now send you our University catalogue. No, it will not do, I see, for anything weighing over two ounces or three. Beyond this the rates increase woefully....

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

18th October, 1855.

Yours of August 30th (answered by my wife) was written when I was one day at sea. Yours of October 13, which arrived to-day, was written two days after I reached home again. I had two very pleasant voyages, on the whole, and not long, ten and a half and eleven and a half days; eleven days in Paris (where I was detained a little by a severe cold on my lungs) and a week in England, mostly at London and Kew. I found my brother-in-law so convalescent that I might have stayed at home, and I brought him home with me in good condition. We had hoped, till the last moment, to get places in the steamer of the 13th October, and to have had a fortnight more in England. But all the places had been engaged for months, and nobody was giving up berths up to the time we sailed; so we had to come in steamer of the 29th ult., where we got a good stateroom by great luck, though the vessel was greatly crowded. Dr. Joseph D. Hooker (whom I had wanted to see for some time) being away in Germany, and time being extremely valuable to me here, I was on the whole very glad to get home. The naturalists at Paris were en vacance, and mostly away. I saw only Brongniart, Spach, Gay, Dr. Montagne, and Trécul (who sent, I believe, some pamphlets for you; the package is not yet unpacked), and my good friend Vilmorin. Boissier was there from Geneva.

In England I spent all the little time I could command at dear Hooker’s at Kew; and Bentham, then in the country, came down to see me. I made a long and interesting call on Robert Brown, who is very old, but full of interest. I shall not again see this Nestor of botanists, as well as facile princeps, in this world.

Hooker was much delighted when I told him you were coming next spring to see him at Kew. He insisted upon taking me over to see the Cactus house, and all through it, so that I might tell you what a mass of Cacteæ there are there; and he will be much pleased to have you work among them. He spoke about his Cuscuteæ, but was not at all displeased at your retaining them; begged you would work them up if possible before returning them. You will be charmed with Sir William when you see him.

As to the “Manual,” my plan, as at present advised, is to cross the line of slavery a little, to take in Kentucky and Virginia; this makes the real division, in botanical geography, between North and South. It should be Northern ground, too, down to this line: for north of it slave labor is good for nothing; and there would be no slaves there, except for the Southern market. I cannot take in Missouri, for I must make the Mississippi my boundary. But all your St. Louis plants cross into Illinois, do they not? Tell me how this is. I shall get at work at the new edition soon. I shall first press on the “Lessons” a little further.

About Fouquiera; I have examined it here repeatedly on the live plant, which every year prolongs its main axis an inch or two. And I took leaves to Providence to show there, especially to remove any lingering doubt on Torrey’s mind. For Torrey would long have it that the spine was a primary leaf, and that an axillary leaf adhered to it by its petiole. He now knows better.

I just saw Agassiz. He looks well and strong....

I read Alphonse De Candolle’s “Géographie Botanique Raisonnée” on the voyage home: a most able work it is, full of interesting matter very methodically arranged. Hooker and Thomson’s “Flora Indica,” vol. i., is famous for its able introductory essay, etc.

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

October 27, 1855.

Your welcome letter of the 7th of August duly reached me. I meant to have surprised you by an answer dated at Paris; but the eleven days I passed there were too busily occupied to allow it. M. Boissier will have told you of my sudden voyage, and the cause of it. I was absent from home only six weeks and a day; and twenty-two days of the forty-three were passed on the water. On returning home I found here:

1. The excellent lithographed portrait of yourself, a pleasing and pretty good likeness. Of the three copies I have offered one to Torrey, the other to Short.

2. The copy of “Géographie Botanique,” which you so kindly addressed to me. (I have already learned that Agassiz and Darlington have theirs; but Torrey not his, and I have directed inquiries to be made.) This was not my first introduction to the book; for I bought a copy of Masson in Paris, to read on the voyage, when I could have more leisure than at home. And I carefully read it then (after having dispatched Hooker and Thomson’s “Flora Indica”) up as far as to p. 1087, when I was obliged by the close of the voyage to break off, at a very interesting point; and I cannot yet resume the reading.

I cannot sufficiently express my profound admiration of this book, so thorough and conscientious, so capital in its method, and embodying such a vast amount of facts well discussed; it might well be the work of a long life. I have marked in many places points on which I may have a word to say, sometimes little details to add or correct, sometimes a criticism to hazard.

If time (which is now precious to me) permit, I will write a series of articles on it for “Silliman’s Journal,” which will serve to make the work generally known to our people, and in which I can insert any commentaries I have time and room for. One article I will devote to plants introduced into this country from Europe. Now that you have so well collected and digested the principal information, it will be easy to complete and correct some points; and this may be useful to you hereafter, as well as to me....

I will procure from Dr. Harris any information he has collected about the potato, which, if Raleigh took it from Virginia to England, must have been brought to Virginia from South America. It was certainly unknown to our aborigines, who, however, along with maize, cultivated beans (Phaseoli) and squashes (Cucurbitæ).

Dr. Hooker had written to me, eulogizing your work in the highest terms. I missed seeing him when in England.

Agassiz speaks most highly of it; but I think he has only looked rapidly through its pages as yet....

I am at this moment preparing to begin the printing of the 2d edition of my “Manual of the Botany of the Northern States.” ...

In consequence of your book, I shall take pains to classify the introduced plants, according to the degree of naturalization, etc.

Many thanks for sending me your portrait. I am already quite rich in the likenesses of botanists, many of which adorn the walls of my apartments....

Believe me to remain, my dear friend, yours very faithfully and truly,

Asa Gray.

TO W. J. HOOKER.

Cambridge, February 25, 1856.

My dear Sir William,—Holton is bringing out a book upon New Granada which will be interesting....

The cypress knee sent was the best and handsomest I had, though not the largest. I am glad it pleases you. But you mistook what I said, or meant to say, which was, that tucked away in the hollow you would find placed a specimen of a forming knee, not much bigger than your knuckle, on a piece of root a foot or so long. Was this overlooked or lost? Please tell me; for I can replace it with another, and physiologically it would be well to show the formation in its various stages....

I want to send you a book by a young friend of ours, Olmsted, on the seaboard slave States,[33] an admirable volume, full of information, and lively withal. I wait for an opportunity. Lady Hooker will be interested in it. Our united warm regards to her.

Thanks to the Duke for anything to facilitate transmission of printed matter. But it is still high; for example, your “Journal,” which I get by post, costs 6d. each number, paid in London, and about 1d. more paid here. There is still room for improvement. I dare not send you “Silliman’s Journal” yet by post.

June 30, 1856.

Charles Wright, who was in the North Pacific Expedition under Ringgold and Rogers, has left his ship at California instead of making the voyage round Cape Horn, and crossed over the Nicaragua route, intending to botanize there some months. Finding himself there among our vile filibustering people, and all in confusion, however, he was soon obliged to come on home. He is awaiting the arrival of his ship, and will not till this autumn be able to touch his Pacific collections, of which the best and principal were made in Hongkong, Bonin, and the Loo Choo Islands and Japan. That they are not larger is not his fault.

Wright has a perfect passion for collecting plants; and already begins to plan other explorations. To satisfy his cravings for a while, I have proposed to him to go to St. Iago de Cuba, and explore that end of the island. What do you think of it? Has any botanist collected there? Would it be too like Jamaica to offer much novelty? But to return. In Nicaragua, Wright collected a goodly quantity of seeds, one set of which he wishes me to send to you; a present to Kew Gardens, as I understand it....

By the way, it was most lucky that I hurried up and had sent on to you the copy of Brackenridge’s “Filices;” for a fire in Philadelphia has consumed all of the poor fellow’s edition of the volume except ten copies which had been sold mostly in Europe. A sad and a heavy loss to B., who had no insurance, and something to me who had advanced to him the paper for printing it on, which now the poor fellow is in no condition to pay for. I have not even a copy of the atlas myself, but I shall get one from the government plates, which are preserved. Brackenridge utterly despairs of reprinting it. But possibly the government will set up the type for him again, as they have also lost a part of their small impression. Otherwise the book will have the value of excessive rarity, if it has no other....

May 25, 1857.

I hear with delight that you are meditating a trip to America, and I write forthwith to express my own and Mrs. Gray’s and my good father-in-law’s earnest hope that you will come over, even if it be for a few weeks only. The rest of the voyage cannot but be useful to so busy a person as you constantly are, and a run through the country, and a sight of the Yankee world, would interest you. At the Montreal scientific meeting you would see several old friends and many new ones. Torrey, Greene, Darlington,[34] James,[35] etc., would be half frantic with pleasure at the thought of seeing you; so it will not do to hint at such a thing, until you give me authority; and as for my wife and me, we will look after you like dutiful children, will go with you to Niagara, or to Lake Superior, if you will go so far, for there is nothing would give us so much pleasure as a visit from you; and if you would bring Lady Hooker or Mrs. Evans, or both, with you, it would be charming. The voyage is nothing to speak of, traveling here is easy and rapid, although not so very comfortable, as in England, and a good deal of the country can be seen in a few weeks without much fatigue. Pray do come, and exceedingly gratify,

Your affectionate and faithful
A. Gray.

TO JAMES D. DANA.

December 13, 1856.

My dear Dana,—I duly received the sheets I asked for.

The right way to bring a series of pretty interesting general questions towards settlement is perhaps in hand (though I do not expect myself to bring anything important to bear on it), viz., for a number of totally independent naturalists, of widely different pursuits and antecedents, to environ it on all sides, work towards a common centre, but each to work perfectly independently. Such men as Darwin, Dr. Hooker, De Candolle, Agassiz, and myself,—most of them with no theory they are bound to support,—ought only to bring out some good results. And the less each one is influenced by the other’s mode of viewing things the better. For my part, in respect to the bearings of the distribution of plants, etc., I am determined to know no theory, but to see what the facts tend to show, when fairly treated.

On the subject of species, their nature, distribution, what system in natural history is, etc., certain inferences are slowly settling themselves in my mind, or taking shape; but on some of the most vexed questions I have as yet no opinion whatever, and no very strong bias, thanks, partly, to the fact that I can think of and investigate such matters only now and then, and in a very desultory way.

I cannot say that I believe in centres of radiation for groups of species. From Darwin’s questions to me I think I perceive some of the grounds on which he would maintain it. One is attended to on page 77 of the January number [of “Silliman’s Journal”], but I am not clear that they are not just as susceptible of other interpretation.

But as to a centre of radiation for each separate species, I must say I have a bias that way. You seem to have also, and you can best judge whether this, combined with geological considerations, would not involve centres of radiation for groups of species as well, to a certain extent. Would not the fact that the members of peculiar groups (in Vegetable Kingdom) are to a great extent localized favor that view?

I am glad to hear that your idea of the unity of the human species is confirmed more and more. The evidence seems to me most strongly to favor it. And you well discriminate the separate questions of unity of birthplace and unity of parentage....

As to the physical question, surely you do not suppose that, in a fresh race, the one or two necessary close intermarriages would sensibly deteriorate the stock. Look at domestic animals of peculiar races,—how long you can breed in and in without much abatement of health or vigor!

Did you ever consider the question of the cause of deterioration from interbreeding?

I think I have somewhere in the “Journal” stated my notion about it, or hinted at it. If not, I will, some day; for I have a pretty decided opinion about it: that hereditary transmission of individual peculiarities involves also, among them, the transmission of disease, or tendency to disease,—a constantly increasing heritage of liability as interbreeding goes on; in plants well exemplified by maladies affecting old cultivated varieties long propagated by division.

I should much enjoy a visit with you at New Haven, and so would my wife, no less. Hope we may some day....

Yours faithfully,
A. Gray.

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

March 26, 1857.

Fendler is back again in the country of Venezuela, and making fine collections. He will complete the sets of his former distribution, but not send the same things over again. He has found many more Filices. Will you and M. Dunant continue?

On Wright’s return home he was troubled with rheumatism, and longed for a warm climate to pass the winter in. So I sent him to the east end of Cuba (where I wished the Huets to go). He is doing very well there.

Oregon is still in a disturbed and unsafe state. But I should inform you that a commission has been raised to run our northwestern boundary with the British government; and it will probably be commenced this year. The party would have a sufficient escort, and this would give the Huets a safe opportunity for botanizing across the continent in a high latitude, if they are so disposed. I know not any details, but I could learn them, if need be, and there would be no difficulty in procuring needful protection for the Huets, they finding their own subsistence.

I have published two statistical articles, based on my “Botany of the Northern States,” in “Silliman’s Journal,” and a third is now printing in that journal for May. I shall have extra copies to send you. There are other topics I mean to take up, if I can find time....

TO GEORGE BENTHAM.

May 4, 1857.

Since your letter came I have looked up and read the article in the “Edinburgh,” and like it much. Your few words about Genera, page 517, appear to comprise the gist of the whole matter. As to your fuller exposition, not being able to lay hands on the “Literary Gazette,” I wait to see your article in the “Journal of the Linnæan Society.”

I am particularly interested in what you write of your popular “British Flora,” and the English names; and I am going to ask you to explain to me more fully the principles on which you proceed. For, if practicable, I am going to have occasion to do something of the sort here. Pray illustrate your plan a little; as I see much difficulty in carrying it out, except in so small a flora as the British, where every plant has a popular name. One additional difficulty here is that our common English names are mostly misapplied ones, and the plants that have indigenous trivial names have too many of them, varying in different parts of the country.

How do you name the orders? What relation will you have between your specific names and your generic, and how many words will you allow each to consist of?

Give me your names through some family, say Ranunculaceæ. If I can see my way clear, I shall follow your lead, or cause it to be followed on an occasion which will soon be presented.

I wish I had known of Clitoria Mariana-acuminata, etc., in time to add it to my list in the last number of “Silliman’s Journal;” a copy of the article was sent to Dr. Hooker by post last week. I will send more, from my extras, presently.

I am quite prepared for what you say about interchange of species of United States and Europe taking place via Asia, instead of across the Atlantic; but you will see there are a few, besides aquatics (Subularia, Eriocaulon, etc.), which would seem to have taken the shorter cut.

As respects identical species, interchange is the only thing that, on our views of what a species is, will explain the occurrence of the same species here and there. But as to genera, I do not yet feel free to assume an interchange, or a former continuity of land, between two widely separated regions on account of their having identical genera or closely related species. I see no reason why cognate species may not have been originally given to most widely separated stations; and, as to the facts of association, can we say more than this, that the species of a genus are apt to be confined to one part of the world? Are there not too many cases to the contrary to warrant our suspecting former continuity of two remote districts on account of common genera? Peculiar genera, such as Torreya, Illicium, Philadelphus, Astilbe, etc., divided between Japan and the United States of America, indicate some peculiar relation, and are most noteworthy, but I do not see why it points to connection.

I am very glad you are turning your good, logical mind and immense knowledge to this class of topics; but do not let it run off with too much of your valuable time. I take far more satisfaction in discussing questions of botanical affinity; and long to get back to that sort of work. Just now, I must needs be absorbed in elementary work and teaching, but look to see an end of this.

I have been watching the development of the ovules of Magnolia; nothing can be more normal than they are, in the early stages.

When Wright comes home from Cuba I expect to get hold of his considerable north Japan collection, which I expect to find very interesting on questions of distribution, the very questions you ask me to consider.

I doubt if our “mountain backbone” actually stops any species, itself, from advancing east or west.

I wish you would compare our White Birch with the European B. alba, and let me know the result. Also the Chestnuts....

TO R. W. CHURCH.

Cambridge, May 15, 1857.

An acquaintance en route for Scotland has offered to take some small parcels for me.

Among them is one I have taken the liberty to address to you, a copy of a very elementary book[36] I have prepared as an introduction to my favorite science, finding there was no one in use here which I thought fit to put into the hands of young beginners. Here botany is taught, somehow or other, in most schools, and generally by incompetent teachers from wretched books, i. e., those used in the ordinary schools and for young people.

I have endeavored, in the little book I send you, to make real science as easy and simple as possible. I doubt if I have yet aimed low enough; but the book seems to take, and promises to be useful.

Although not adapted for your meridian (where you have doubtless good elementary books enough), yet when your boy, who must now be five or six years old, if he has been spared to you, gets a few years older, I shall be much gratified if this little volume should interest him, and aid you somewhat in developing in his mind a love for the study of nature in one of its pleasantest branches....

I want to offer you my new “Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States,” not that it can be of any use or of much interest to you, but must not load my kind acquaintance with more parcels. I wait for an opportunity of sending through the booksellers, before long.

TO JAMES D. DANA.

November 7, 1857.

If you have plenty, please send me two more copies of your “Thoughts on Species.”

I first read it carefully, a week ago, and I meant to write you at once how I like it, and a few remarks, but something prevented at the time, and I have been very busy and preoccupied ever since.

For the reason that I like the general doctrine, and wish to see it established, so much the more I am bound to try all the steps of the reasoning, and the facts it rests on, impartially, and even to suggest all the adverse criticism I can think of. When I read the pamphlet I jotted down on the margin some notes of what struck me at the time. I will glance at them again, and see if, on reflection, they appear likely to be of the least use to you, and if so will send them, taking it for granted that you rather like to be criticised, as I am sure I do, when the object is the surer establishment of truth.

In your idea of species as specific amount or kind of concentrated force, you fall back upon the broadest and most fundamental views, and develop it, it seems to me, with great ability and cogency.

Taking the cue of species, if I may so say, from the inorganic, you develop the subject to great advantage for your view, and all you say must have great weight, in “reasoning from the general.”

But in reasoning from inorganic species to organic species, and in making it tell where you want it and for what you want it to tell, you must be sure that you are using the word “species” in the same sense in the two, that the one is really an equivalent of the other. That is what I am not yet convinced of. And so to me the argument comes only with the force of an analogy, whereas I suppose you want it to come as demonstration. Very likely you could convince me that there is no fallacy in reasoning from the one to the other to the extent you do. But all my experience makes me cautious and slow about building too much upon analogies; and until I see further and clearer, I must continue to think that there is an essential difference between kinds of animals or plants and kinds of matter. How far we may safely reason from the one to the other is the question. If we may do so even as far as you do, might not Agassiz (at least plausibly) say, that as the species Iron was created in a vast number of individuals over the whole earth, so the presumption is that any given species of plants or animals was originated in as many individuals as there are now, and over as wide an area, the human species under as great diversities as it now has (barring historical intermixture)?—so reducing the question between you to insignificance, because then the question whether men are of one or of several species would no longer be a question of fact, or of much consequence.

You can answer him from another starting-point, no doubt; but he may still insist that it is a legitimate carrying out of your own principle....

The tendency of my mind is opposed to this sort of view; but you may be sure that before long there must be one more resurrection of the development theory in a new form, obviating many of the arguments against it, and presenting a more respectable and more formidable appearance than it ever has before....

I wanted to say something on the last two pages, but as I have nothing in particular to except to, and much to approve, and as it is late bedtime, I spare you further comments.

I set out to find flaws, as likely to be more suggestive and therefore far more useful to you than any amount of praise, with which I could fill page after page.

TO W. J. HOOKER.

Cambridge, December 6, 1857.

Your first letter is now gone to Sullivant, because you speak of him so handsomely, and say that Mitten is instructed to prepare a set of Mosses for him. A noble fellow is Sullivant and deserves all you say of him and his works. The more you get to know of him the better you will like him.

Let me tell you about my “Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States.” It was quite impossible, of course, that the publishers should provide such illustrations as the fourteen plates and keep the book at a salable price, so Sullivant, on his own motion, had the eight plates of Musci engraved in copper, at his own cost, for $630 (about £126), and gave them to the work, after printing 250 copies for his separate booklet I sent you. I gave the six plates of Ferns, etc., cut on stone by Sprague to complete the plan. In the “Journal” you are wrong in supposing that the Musci were even drawn by Sprague. If in time please correct this when you notice his book. Sullivant drew them all with his own hands (as he did those of former memoirs which pleased you well), and had them copied and reduced to proper size by a German artist he employs. So that besides his labor, he has expended at least £180 in money, on these plates. They were executed on copper by a young engraver in Boston.

Your second letter, begun the day the other was dispatched, reached me a few days ago, while dear Torrey was here on a visit. He has just returned to New York. We called to see Greene, but he was not in....

TO GEORGE BENTHAM.

November 16, 1857.

I have noted with interest Naudin’s doings in Cucurbitacæ. It has induced me to look a little into the geographical question, and I begin really to think C. Pepo, and perhaps others, are American. Mr. Sophocles, our Greek tutor, who knows cultivated plants well, and everything about mediæval and ancient Greek, is quite clear that the ancients knew nothing of pumpkins and winter squashes, and is able to correct De Candolle’s lucubrations in one or two points. Our New England and Canadian aborigines had beans, too. Those and Cucurbita came north from a warmer climate with maize, I presume....

When I got your proof-sheet of the “British Flora” and your long letter of 28th May, there was something I wanted to talk about, I dare say, but there was no writing then, as you had gone abroad, and now the subject is all out of my head. But I have occasion to take up the subject of popular names of plants quite seriously in a week or two, and I may have something to remark.

I wish to follow your lead, but should be disposed to go rather farther than you do in adopting English names. For instance, I would certainly adopt Mousetail instead of Myosure. Myosure is hardly more English than before clipping its tail a little, and Mousetail is the exact equivalent. Corydal and Astragal I quite like, as they have really no English names. I incline to Crowfoot as a generic appellation. To extend it over the whole genus is only doing what is so often done with scientific generic names. In the case of genera having very strongly marked subgenera, would it not be possible to let the subgeneric name govern the popular nomenclature? as say—

There are formidable difficulties about this popular nomenclature, yet they must be surmounted in some way or other.

As we are making much of English, why not say “rootstock” instead of “rhizome.” I do not like French forms. I would even say “pod” instead of “capsule,” in popular parlance.

Kindly send me proofs as you go on. I want much to see them.

Wright’s collections in North Pacific Expedition are here, and he is turning over his Behring Straits collection and trying to work it out, with some help from me. There is a Hongkong collection; there may be some of these he would like to ask you to name, so far as you may off hand. The Japan collection I will elaborate myself. There is not so much from the north as I expected. They had no chance to explore the small islands connecting with the Kurile Islands. I have only peeped into one or two parcels; but in one I saw two things which will interest you as much as they did me. Imagine the two most characteristic possible eastern United States plants, Caulophyllum and Diphylleia, both, I believe, our very species. Tell this to Dr. Hooker!

The only domestic news I have to tell you is, that on a hot August day our beloved Newfoundland dog was found dead,—really a sad loss. To console us my brother-in-law, a fortnight after, sent me a puppy of the same breed, an uneasy, frolicsome, awkward fellow yet, but promising to be intelligent and very handsome. We could not bear to give him the name of his lamented predecessor; so Mrs. Gray named him Hans,—a souvenir of Pontrilas....

Dr. Gray’s dogs and cats were always well-recognized members of the family. He had a great love of animals, which was warmly returned by his different pets. In his early married life the kittens he helped raise by feeding them with a dropping-tube from his microscope rather preferred him to their young and careless mother, and, confounding all other men with him, were perpetually scrambling into laps, to the surprise of callers. Two grew into fine cats, who demanded a regular attention and consideration from him, reminding him by gentle taps, one on each side, when bedtime came.

Of his first dog, he always said that they stood more in the relation of brothers than master and dog; and the dog felt a guardian care of him. The different characters of his two Newfoundland dogs, and of the smaller ones he had later, interested him, for they were singularly different, though both the Newfoundlands shared his affection for a pretty Maltese cat who had succeeded the other cats; they were especially fond of her kittens and attentive to them, allowing them all sorts of liberties. The cats and dogs always lived affectionately together. Dr. Gray always recognized their good consciences, which varied somewhat with the different type of animal, and considered that the size of different breeds had much to do with their characteristics. They always learned to eat what their master did; not so much, he would say, from any preference for oysters and dry toast, as that they were ambitious to do as far as possible what he did.

He was very skillful in the handling of animals, and they recognized it in allowing him to perform small surgical operations, to dress wounds, etc., with a touching trust and submission.

TO GEORGE BENTHAM.

March 9, 1858.

My dear Bentham,—Many thanks for yours of February 14. Although much pleased to hear from you, I cannot expect to hear often, unless you have something special to say. No one but Hooker can write long and frequent letters while he is doing such a vast amount of work, and keeping up such a fresh, and keen, and scrutinizing interest in such a great variety of subjects. I wonder how he does it. How well oiled the machinery of his brain must be to do it all without great wear and tear! If you or I had half these matters to think of at once, we should go distracted. Warn Hooker to take good care of himself and not break down in health. It is a facility which he inherits, that of turning from one thing to another without loss of time or of working power.

I shall be pleased to see the “Handbook” when it is out. Never mind what people say. I dare say the little book will do a great deal of good....

I am glad you will distribute more of Spruce’s plants. I want especially any of his Andes collections, for Baños was one of our Exploring Expedition stations. I am going to finish up our Exploring Expedition this year (D. V.), and have done with it. That and some other things done, and I dream of coming over to England, and working at nothing but “North American Flora,” de novo. I hope I may, and that I shall find you and Mrs. B. as fresh as ever, and enjoying yourselves to the full....

April 26.

My last book[37] in elementary botany is now just off my hands, and will be out in a fortnight. I hope it will be of use. Forgive me for writing horn-books, and I am now done with that sort of work. There were several convincing reasons for doing it.

TO DANIEL CADY EATON.[38]

February 23, 1858.

I dare say you may learn something here as to teaching, etc., if you can pick it up yourself, which, after all, is the only way anything worth knowing is obtained. But from now to the end of April I am just overwhelmed with work, and shall have no time to give any special instruction.

At the opening of the term I begin my drilling of Sophomores in the “Botanical Text-Book.” My lectures to a selection of Juniors, on Systematic Botany, I do not ordinarily commence till April 1, but this year I am able to begin early in March, though not much work is done till May. You might attend Agassiz’s lectures, but he will not be back from Florida as soon as the opening of the term.

Let me know how much instruction you have to give this year, and of what sort, and I can see whether I can help you much. I dare say you will teach very well.

There are certain little matters you might pick up about class illustration and manipulation without it costing you much time. We were just thinking of sending you Wright’s Hongkong ferns.

Suppose you come on, count as a pupil, or as a visitor, as you like, work away as you think best, making preparations for your course, in which I will help you all I can. And at the same time work up Wright’s Hongkong and Bonin and Japan ferns (bring any books you want which I have not). I want to drill you a little at systematic work, and think you will learn something that way. Come straight here. We shall want you to stay with us, if the house is empty. And if not we shall make no difficulty of sending you down to the Brattle House. But it would be so much more convenient here.

I am very desirous that you should be duly established at Yale, and have no doubt you will satisfy the college and fill the place with comfort and credit.

We will talk over matters at odd moments when you come.

I shall be most glad to help you as a friend and fellow-worker; but I cannot promise any special instruction, and shall take no fee. “Dog does not eat dog,” is the saying, you know.

Judge Lowell writes, in 1888, “I was in college when Dr. Gray was appointed to his professorship at Harvard, and ours was, I think, the first or one of the first classes to whom he lectured. I remember his lectures well, they were so full of knowledge and of enthusiasm and so calculated to impress the young mind.

“I suppose he had not lectured much of late years; and in his many other successes, his powers as a lecturer may have been overlooked by those who have written of him.”

Dr. Rothrock, in his address before the memorial meeting of the botanical section of the Academy at Philadelphia, speaks of Dr. Gray’s patient drilling of him in writing his thesis, making him go over and over it again, until it had been rewritten six times before he allowed him to be satisfied with it. His pupils would always remember his comment when satisfied,—“That is neatly stated.”

And Dr. Farlow shows the picturesque figure “hurrying down Garden Street (on lecture mornings) so covered by the mass of branches and flowers which were to illustrate the lecture that his head and body were hardly visible.”[39]

“The few who gathered around the little table in Harvard Hall, in pursuit of knowledge which did not count in the college reckoning, will never forget the untiring patience with which he explained what then seemed difficult, the contagious enthusiasm with which he led them on from simple facts toward the higher fields of science, or the tender personal interest which he showed in their hopes and half-formed plans for the future; an interest which, on his part, only strengthened as years passed on, and makes them now mourn, not so much the death of a great botanist as the loss of a sympathizing friend.”[40]

TO W. J. HOOKER.

April 30, 1858.

I must tell you that in humble imitation of Kew, I am going to establish a museum of vegetable products, etc., in our university.

The erection of a new building for the Museum of Comparative Anatomy and for the Mineralogical Cabinet liberates the very fine hall used for the Mineralogical Cabinet formerly. This I have applied for, and obtained for my purposes, and am taking into it the various things I have picked up from time to time. It is a room about forty-five feet long, with deep alcoves the whole length of each side, already shelved, and with glass doors to the cases, a window in each of the ten alcoves; the centre, or nave, serves for my lecture-room. So now I shall beg all my students and correspondents to send me every sort of vegetable thing; so if there is anything you need still from this country you should let me know; and whenever you are overrun with duplicate woods, etc., just think how welcome such things would be here, and how they may stimulate our collectors and travelers, who perchance may occasionally send me something that would fill some gap in the Kew museum.

Mr. Wright is having a good training here, and when he goes again to Cuba, or elsewhere, will do much better, both as to common botanical specimens and for collecting vegetable products and curiosities.

Dr. A. A. Gould, who will bring a line to you, is a physician in Boston, and one of our best zoölogists, especially in conchology, etc.; a most excellent man. He takes a well-deserved holiday for three months or so, mostly in a run over the Continent. He has London friends in plenty. He may like to see Kew Gardens before one o’clock, and would be pleased to pay his respects to you in person, if his time allows a flying visit to Kew before he proceeds to the Continent.

Just at this moment, and since my parcel of books for you left the house, the May number of “Silliman’s Journal” has come in. I will ask Dr. Gould to take it to you....

June 21.

About the museum. Ours is to be not economical (except in the sense that it must not cost anything to speak of) but for class illustration and botanical research. So I want woods, fruits, seeds, etc., and must keep all within narrow limits. All I could venture to ask from you is that whenever your keeper or Dr. Hooker should be throwing out duplicates to save room, you would have some such things boxed up for me. I should indeed like to go over to you, and select for myself, as you and Dr. Hooker suggest. Joseph suggests that I should be sent over by the university for the purpose! His whole idea is as magnificent as my plan is humble. I fear I must always travel and cross the ocean at my own charges. But the proposition suggests to me that, when I am ready to revisit England, this will be a good ground for asking leave of absence without cutting off my pay. But there is much to be done before I can leave home again, and when I shall be ready and able to do so, if it please Providence that I may be, I want two full years and most of it at Kew. How I hope it may be done in your day, and that I may receive your cordial greeting, and find you as hale and as actively useful as ever. But “l’homme propose,” etc. We are delighted to hear from Mrs. E. that you are well and strong again.

Boott kindly writes me of Brown by every mail; by the next arrival we must expect to hear that he is no more....

Wherever Wright goes, you may rely upon the fullest set of his gatherings, and we may expect they will be better than formerly. For (what I never thought he would have patience for) he has really taken to studying botany, which he never did before, and digs away at his dried specimens most perseveringly. At first it went against the grain, and he used to wish himself far off in the woods. But he has kept on for six or eight months, and now generally prefers to find out a plant by his own skill, rather than have me tell him what it is; so he will be able to collect more understandingly, and the year passed here will not be lost time.

Dr. Robert Brown died shortly after the date of this letter. In Dr. Gray’s memoir of him, he says:—

“Upon the death of Robert Brown, it was remarked that, next to Humboldt, his name adorned the list of a greater number of scientific societies than that of any other naturalist or philosopher. It was Humboldt himself who, many years ago, saluted Brown with the appellation, ‘Botanicorum facile princeps,’ and the universal consent of botanists recognized and confirmed the title.... Brown delighted to rise from a special case to high and wide generalizations; and was apt to draw most important and always irresistible conclusions from small selected data or particular points of structure. He had unequaled skill in finding decisive instances.... So all his discoveries and all his notes and observations are fertile far beyond the reader’s expectation. Perhaps no naturalist ever taught so much in writing so little.... Those who knew him as a man will bear unanimous testimony to the unvarying simplicity, truthfulness, and benevolence of his character, as well as to the singular uprightness of his judgment.”[41]

TO R. W. CHURCH.

June 1, 1858.

Your gift of the “Oxford Essays” came to me, and was partly read with much interest before the arrival of your kind letter of the 31st March. Many thanks for both.

I know too little of French literature, early or late, but I admire your article for its neat and delicate delineation and discrimination of character. I read with interest, not unmingled with concern, Baden Powell’s and Wilson’s articles. The latter person I heard preach one of the Bampton lectures at Oxford, 1851. Into what will the latitudinarian school, if I may so call it, develop at Oxford?

Gladstone’s article I have not had time to read yet, nor his large work, which probably will reach us presently, through our book club,—I hope at a time when I have more leisure than now.

Last week the publishers, at my request, sent to Trübner & Company, American booksellers (12 or 20) Paternoster Row, a copy of a new and more elementary book[42] of mine than the one you are pleased to compliment. I intended that as a kind of horn-book, which Dr. Hooker insists it is not; and as something more simple was wanted here, to lead the way both to the “Lessons” and especially to the “Manual,” which is rather strong for beginners, I have tried again, and you will see the result. I should have made the little “Popular Flora” fuller if the publishers had allowed more room.

Having last year reëdited my “Botanical Textbook” (of which, to complete your set, a copy is also sent to you, through Trübner), I have now done my part in elementary botanical writing, and I return with zest to my drier investigations, in which I have much to do.

If I ever find time I am greatly disposed to write some day upon the principles of classification,—the ground in nature for classification, the nature and distribution and probable origin of species,—knotty points, upon which I incline to differ decidedly from Agassiz, and considerably from the common notions.

Some of the more immediate and best-established deductions I hope to bring out in a paper I shall soon be occupied with, containing the results of a comparison of the flora of Japan (in which I have new materials) with our own of the United States of America.

My college work keeps me very busy at this season.

... I see no near prospect of revisiting the Old World. The commercial troubles last autumn have reduced our moderate means and prospects a little. But if I live I must yet have two years’ work in England and on the Continent. With great regard, I remain,

Yours very faithfully,
Asa Gray.

TO JOHN TORREY.

July 27, 1858.

I have to-day received a nice present from Vilmorin of Paris, i. e., the copy of Robert Brown’s “Prodromus,” presented by him to A. L. de Jussieu.

... I am kept here, too, by the attending suddenly to building a new conservatory, for which a donation of $2,000 has been received. I cannot leave till it is well under way.

I am deep in Japan botany; interesting results.

September 24.

At length we are home again, arriving night before last, very direct from Quebec, where we had (as everywhere else upon our whole route—Litchfield, New York, Palisades, Fairfield, Sauquoit, Montreal, etc.) a delightful time. J. much stronger, except for a cold caught in Quebec, which still lingers.

Colonel Munro[43] was very kind; is a jolly good fellow, as the English say.

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

October 14, 1858.

By this time you are in your house, I hope, and all comfortable, and ready soon to set to work.

I rejoice to hear that Mr. Shaw keeps up his zeal, and will make a creditable establishment. I wish him all prosperity. If he will make and keep up a general herbarium it will save you much time and money....

October 30.

I have yours of the 24th. Tatnall[44] is an old friend of Dr. Darlington, new to me, but writing to me of late. I know not his age, profession, character, etc., etc. But he appears to know the plants around him very well....

Hope you are getting settled down and comfortable.

I met Agassiz at the Club. He is cordial and pleasant. He had not heard of your return, which I wondered at....

Fendler is with you, at least in St. Louis. Short is ready to advance something if he will fall to collecting again wherever you say. Get him some appointment with the army at Utah. That is the place. What is the good of your both being Democrats if you cannot get something for it!!

December 3.

Darwin asks me to find out if you medical men have ascertained or noticed any difference in liability to take fevers of warm climates, say yellow fever, between light-complexioned and dark-complexioned people of the Caucasian race. If you know personally anything about it, or where anything is published bearing on the point, kindly let me know, and oblige

Your old friend,
Asa Gray.

TO GEORGE BENTHAM.

December 13, 1858.

Boott writes in glowing terms of your paper on British flora and distribution lately read; and I hope soon to read it in the “Linnæan Journal.”

That the interchange of temperate species between North America and Europe has taken place via Asia is now a patent fact; and now the whole subject, and the probable explanation, begins to be clear to see.

December 31.

A happy New Year to you and Mrs. Bentham, and many thanks for your letter promising me your paper on Hongkong plants to print here. Pray give me passim any notes that occur to you upon Loo Choo plants, etc. I shall now soon be done with my Japan studies, and shall print a paper bringing to view curious facts of distribution, etc., and lay out a set for the Kew herbarium. How true it is, as you intimated, that the interchange in northern hemisphere has mainly been via Asia.

I heartily admire your “Handbook,” and await with great interest your paper growing out of it; your experience is so great and your judgment so sound. As to English nomenclature, we can only approximate to a good system; the practical difficulties are too great, often insurmountable. It seems to me you hit the happy medium, if we must needs have popular name of the genus coëxtensive with the Latin one; but I rather doubt the advisability of that, and would use sub-generic popular names for generic, I think. Though “I do not much like” the whole thing, yet somebody must attend to English nomenclature, for better or worse; so I am glad you took it up.

I hope you will study perigynous and epigynous. As to ovary, which, putting the important part for the whole, we have learned to use in place of pistil, it certainly is perfectly novel to me to hear the name applied to the gynæcium of Ranunculus. I am confident the word is never so used in De Candolle or Endlicher. I do not recall any instance of your using the word in any such sense; I am sure I never did. Where the fact of the combination is doubtful or ambiguous, if I said ovary, that would infer the combination; if ovaries, the distinctness. In Apocynaceæ A. De Candolle steadily writes ovarium or ovaria, according to the nature of the case. Per contra, you might as well call the column of Malva a stamen! For the collective term, I wish, in your paper, you would go for restoring to use the Linnæan term pistillum, and against the habit of using ovarium in a double sense, that is, sometimes for whole female organ, sometimes for its ovule-bearing portion. Pray do not add a third; and so when you speak of ovary in Clematis leave us to gather, from the context, whether you mean, (1) the whole gynæcium; (2) a separate pistil; or, (3) the ovuliferous portion of a pistil.

Hooker calls my judgment about root and radicle “a flippant snub”! I beg a thousand pardons, and had no intention to be flippant or dogmatical, but simply to record a fact. For mistake, pray read take. My thanks for his letter of December 8th; will write him soon.

February 2, 1859.

I wish I had now your paper on geographical distribution, while I am working up the relations of the Japan flora in this respect. Where is Agardh’s paper published, and what does it amount to?...

I cannot answer Dr. Hooker’s exceedingly interesting letter about theoretical ancient distribution of plants this week. Tell him I shall have some evidence which will come well into his views as to north temperate zone.

TO W. J. HOOKER.

January 24, 1859.

I hope soon to hear that Government will acquire your herbarium, and make bountiful provision for its increase and maintenance. After all Brown’s genius, you have done more for botany than a dozen Browns, and made a hundredfold more sacrifices and efforts. To you, and to your son, England and the botanical world owe the greatest debt of gratitude,—a debt which I hope will continue to accumulate a long time yet....

TO JOHN TORREY.

January 7, 1859.

My dear Friend,—I will send your bundles presently, after Tuesday next, till when I must work like a dog, to get through the Japan collection, and read a paper on Tuesday at a social meeting of the Academy at Mr. Loring’s house that evening (January 11th). Now come on (if by day train), stop there, 8 Ashburton Place, where I will be.

I am going to hold forth for nearly an hour, upon Japan botany in its relation to ours and the rest of the northern temperate zone, and knock out the underpinning of Agassiz’s theories about species and their origin; show, from the very facts that stumbled De Candolle, the high probability of single and local creation of species, turning some of Agassiz’s own guns against him.

I introduced it here at Club, last month, and Agassiz took it very well, indeed....

I asked Thurber the name of a couple of Grasses. Let the Grass-man speak; now that he is turned out to grass, let him attend to his grazing.

February 19.

Andersson writes me that I am chosen one of the six botanists on the foreign list of Stockholm Academy, to fill the vacancy caused by Robert Brown’s death.

Friday evening, [April].

I have your two favors of 12th and 15th. I am very grateful for the nice care you take of my wife. You seem to have her under very thorough control.

Cure her up fast as you can, and please return her per railway on the 3d of May; for the 4th being the eleventh anniversary of our union, we must not be separated then—“The Union, it must be preserved.” ...

I send back your Cavendish with many thanks.

The old cock was much like Robert Brown in many respects. Though there is nothing in him to love, he calls out a sort of admiration, partly in the literal sense, that is, wonder, mixed with pity, that he had no feelings. Brown had, and besides he was social and not so very queer, but he lived very much in the same way, and I suppose had as little sense of religion.

Schreber spells Anthephora, but gives no derivation. P. de B., you see, does, so Anthephora is doubtless right.

Can that and Buffalo-grass be the same? I doubt. Has the Anthephora-like plant no stamens of its own?

The mode of growth does not so much distinguish your plant from Newberry’s Hemitones, and verily I suspect they are the same species. Pity you come in and spoil a good name!...

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

April 27, 1859.

I am charmed at the intelligence you give of your son, and that he takes to botany with spirit, so that he may continue the celebrity of the honored name of De Candolle in the third generation.

We shall welcome him when he comes to America and will do all we can to advance his objects. Oregon and the country to the north of it (British Columbia) will be in good and safe condition to explore, and I am convinced that there is still much to find in the Sandwich Islands, especially in the interior of Hawaii, where there is said to be a broad, almost untrodden, wooded region, between the principal mountain-masses, and occupying a good part of the interior of the island. But it will take time, patience, and considerable means to explore this region; provisions must be carried in for a long way, and many natives employed in feeding the exploring party. Next, the Kurile Islands, and all the northern part of Japan, Yesso, and the islands northeast of it offer the greatest interest; Manchuria also, but the Russians will look after that; Korea could perhaps be explored, so that the expedition you have suggested strikes my fancy as the best that could be, and would take your son through regions full of interest, safe to explore, and healthy. Certainly I can suggest nothing better.

Pray give my best regards to M. Boissier and to other friends in Geneva. I trust you will have safety and tranquillity in Switzerland. But it appears as if you would have war all around you,—a very sad state of things. Our latest intelligence looks very warlike, I am sorry to see. With all my heart I join in the supplication, “Give peace in our time, O Lord.” From such a war as is threatened no good can spring, in any result....

Ever and very cordially yours,

Asa Gray.

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

May 18, 1859.

Well, even $10,000 a year is much better than nothing for the botanical establishment. I wish we had half of that....

If Shaw will be liberal in his establishment, why not turn over to him your general herbarium? If I had one I could have free access to always, I would not take the expense and trouble of keeping up and increasing one myself....

So, you have made the capital discovery, and proved the so-called Anthephora to be the female of Buffalo-grass. I would not have believed it without direct evidence.

I cannot study it; it would take me a long while to get the case so before me that my opinion about the affinities of the grass would be of any use; but it is most interesting, and I beg you to work it out in detail and thoroughly....

June 6.

As to your own herbarium, I think you are right for the present. Keep you own; arrange it on paper of the size of Shaw’s. But look to an eventual combination, either in Shaw’s lifetime or soon after, and be open to propositions from Shaw; as, for example, to take your whole herbarium, provide for maintenance and increase, and when ready, to make you director of the whole concern. This duty must devolve upon you, and when it does, with a decent salary, you could reside up there, throw physic to the dogs, or only take a share in consultations, and have time to do yourself justice in botany.

Meanwhile, if Shaw would take your herbarium upon proper terms, you might at any time have any particular families of plants with you, in your house, to work at....

Mr. Shaw has lately written. I inclose his letter to you. I have just replied to it, expressing a lively interest in his projected establishment, and offering my best services if he requires them in the way of advice or suggestion. I hope it will be all right in the end....

CHAPTER VI.
LETTERS TO DARWIN AND OTHERS.
1860-1868.

As before stated, Dr. Gray’s letters to Dr. Darwin previous to 1862 have been destroyed, save the one dated January 23, 1860, which was published in Darwin’s “Life and Letters,” and is here reproduced for the convenience of the reader, as well as Dr. Gray’s letter of January 5, 1860, to Dr. Joseph D. Hooker, also published in Darwin’s “Life and Letters.” The original letters to Darwin later than 1862 have been more or less injured, apparently by the ravages of mice, so that in copying them it has sometimes been necessary to supply missing words. Where these are not obvious, the supposed words are enclosed in brackets.

The letters in this chapter also include the period of the civil war; into which, as they show, Dr. Gray threw himself with all his earnestness. He helped as far as he was able in every way. A company of the men who were too old or otherwise incapacitated from going to the front was enlisted in Cambridge to guard the State Arsenal there, and also to be ready to be summoned in any emergency; and he joined the ranks and was faithful in the drilling and every duty to which they were called. It is hard to realize, in these days, how all the community worked together in all possible ways; it was the business of life.

TO J. D. HOOKER.

Cambridge, January 5, 1860.

My dear Hooker,—Your last letter, which reached me just before Christmas, has got mislaid during the upturnings in my study which take place at that season, and has not yet been discovered. I should be very sorry to lose it, for there were in it some botanical mems. which I had not secured....

The principal part of your letter was high laudation of Darwin’s book.

Well, the book has reached me, and I finished its careful perusal four days ago; and I freely say that your laudation is not out of place.

It is done in a masterly manner. It might well have taken twenty years to produce it. It is crammed full of most interesting matter, thoroughly digested, well expressed, close, cogent; and taken as a system it makes out a better case than I had supposed possible....

I will write to Darwin when I get a chance. As I have promised, he and you shall have fair play here.... I must myself write a review of Darwin’s book for “Silliman’s Journal” (the more so that I suspect Agassiz means to come out upon it) for the next (March) number, and I am now setting about it when I ought to be every moment working the Exploring Expedition Compositæ, which I know far more about. And really it is no easy job, as you may well imagine.

I doubt if I shall please you altogether. I know I shall not please Agassiz at all. I hear another reprint is in the press, and the book will excite much attention here, and some controversy....

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

Cambridge, January 23, 1860.

My dear Darwin,—You have my hurried letter telling you of the arrival of the remainder of the sheets of the reprint, and of the stir I had made for a reprint in Boston. Well, all looked pretty well, when lo, we found that a second New York publishing house had announced a reprint also! I wrote then to both New York publishers, asking them to give way to the author and his reprint of a revised edition. I got an answer from Harpers that they withdraw; from the Appletons, that they had got the book out (and the next day I saw a copy); but that, “if the work should have any considerable sale, we certainly shall be disposed to pay the author reasonably and liberally.”

The Appletons being thus out with their reprint, the Boston house declined to go on. So I wrote to the Appletons, taking them at their word, offering to aid their reprint, to give them the use of the alterations in the London reprint, as soon as I find out what they are, etc., etc. And I sent them the first leaf, and asked them to insert in their future issue the additional matter from Butler,[45] which tells just right. So there the matter stands. If you furnish any matter in advance of the London third edition, I will make them pay for it.

I may get something for you. All got is clear gain; but it will not be very much, I suppose.

Such little notices in the papers as have yet appeared are quite handsome and considerable.

I hope next week to get printed sheets of my review from New Haven, and send them to you, and will ask you to pass them on to Dr. Hooker.

To fulfill your request, I ought to tell you what I think the weakest, and what the best, part of your book. But this is not easy, nor to be done in a word or two. The best part, I think, is the whole, that is, its plan and treatment, the vast amount of facts and acute inferences handled as if you had a perfect mastery of them. I do not think twenty years too much time to produce such a book in.

Style clear and good, but now and then wants revision for little matters (p. 97, self-fertilizes itself, etc.).

Then your candor is worth everything to your cause. It is refreshing to find a person with a new theory who frankly confesses that he finds difficulties, insurmountable at least for the present. I know some people who never have any difficulties to speak of.

The moment I understood your premises, I felt sure you had a real foundation to hold on. Well, if one admits your premises, I do not see how he is to stop short of your conclusions, as a probable hypothesis at least.

It naturally happens that my review of your book does not exhibit anything like the full force of the impression the book has made upon me. Under the circumstances I suppose I do your theory more good here, by bespeaking for it a fair and favorable consideration, and by standing noncommitted as to its full conclusion, than I should if I announced myself a convert; nor could I say the latter, with truth.

Well, what seems to me the weakest point in the book is the attempt to account for the formation of organs, the making of eyes, etc., by natural selection. Some of this reads quite Lamarckian.

The chapter on Hybridism is not a weak, but a strong chapter. You have done wonders there. But still you have not accounted, as you may be held to account, for divergence up to a certain extent producing increased fertility of the crosses, but carried one short, almost imperceptible, step more, giving rise to sterility, or reversing the tendency. Very likely you are on the right track; but you have something to do yet in that department.

Enough for the present.

I am not insensible to your compliments, the very high compliment which you pay me in valuing my opinion. You evidently think more of it than I do, though from the way I write to you, and especially to Hooker, this might not be inferred from the reading of my letters.

I am free to say that I never learnt so much from one book as I have from yours. There remain a thousand things I long to say about it.

Ever yours,
Asa Gray.

TO CHARLES L. BRACE.

1861 (?)

Dear Brace,—I should criticise various things in your last “Times” article, if you were here to talk it over with me.

If you expected Huxley to do what you criticise him for not doing, you would naturally be disappointed. His merit, and his way as a lecturer, is to select some good topic or point of view and make a clear exposition of it, the clearness of which very much depends upon his not scattering himself over too much ground. He naturally kept himself to matters he could handle well, and let alone those upon which, as we very well know, he had nothing in particular to say.

1. “Merest fancies,” “baseless fabric of a dream,” etc.

Why, what made Owen an evolutionist as early as Darwin? And what has made so many naturalists, Mivart, and lately Dana, for instance, evolutionists, who yet think nothing of Natural Selection?

But to illustrate. You allow that the evolutionary pedigree of the horse is made out. But what had “Natural Selection” to do with the making this out?

It would have been all the very same, both the evidence and the ground of the inference, if Natural Selection had never been propounded. There is no evidence how the forms were selected, there is simply the fact of the series of forms, which, with other like evidence, brings conviction to most naturalists that one has somehow come from the other. And this conviction is about as strong to those who do not believe “Natural Selection” will explain it, as those who do.

2. Professor Guyot, you mean. Dana avowedly adopts from Guyot.

3. To those who talk or think of necessary evolution, or, like Spencer, deduce it ex necessitate rei, this matter of immense time is very pertinent. I don’t think Darwin is bothered by it much. On my way of thinking, it is no bother at all, considering what a deal of time there has been anyway.

4. Do you mean “hybrid forms”? I fail to see what hybrids, that is, mules from the crossing of related species, has to do with it, one way or the other. Nobody (of clear conceptions) supposes new species come from the mixture of other species. That is a way to confuse or blend species, not to originate them. But there is no “want of hybrids;” there are plenty of them, and they have mixed some few species (dogs, for instance); but they play no important part in the matters you are considering.

“Want of connecting forms in living species,” that is to the purpose. Well, as a systematic botanist, I wish there was a want. The connecting forms are my great trouble every day. You would save me an awful deal of trouble, time, and constant uncertainty, if you would cause them to be wanting!

5. So you will not accept the motto “ex uno disce omnes.”

If you admit the horse’s evolution as proved, does not that carry an implication of evolution in other lines, of which similar, but fewer steps are known? Or are all evolutions those of cavalry?

Cambridge, June 17, 1862.

Dear Brace,—Thanks for the “World.” Who wield its destinies?

It is, I suppose, your article on Darwin, a very good one, for its purpose and space.

Before you too confidently reject the evidence for the existence of man in the diluvial period, just turn over a very impartial and good article by Pictet,—a good judge of such matters,—in the March number of the “Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève,” “De la Question sur l’Homme Fossile.”

I presume it is in the Astor Library. If it is not, you may tell Mr. Cogswell there might as well not be any Astor Library.

Ever thine,
A. Gray.

Cambridge, April 22, 1862 (?)

Dear Brace,—You are very welcome to such casual criticism as I can offer on your two pages of manuscript.

The general fact of a segregated people (or individuals of an animal species) becoming best adapted to the particular climate, etc., through Natural Selection is clear enough, the best adapted alone surviving in the long run, and the peculiarities transmitted by the close breeding.

But what your statements tend to make out is, not the tendency of a human race to return to its original type, but only the tendency of the causes which produced a certain effect once, to produce it again, the circumstances continuing,—to produce it in the Fellahs as it produced it in the remote ancestors of the Pharaohs.

That is all safe enough. But your case does not prove that unless you make out that the Egyptian race was nearly destroyed by crossings.

I do not know, but I doubt if you can show that the crossings were ever enough to modify the Egyptian people, at least the common people, who make up the bulk. Slight infusions, you see, would be worked out. The foreign though conquering race would be less prolific and less enduring than the native, etc., etc. So is it not likely that in the Fellahs you have the representatives of the old Egyptians continued, not reproduced, as your remarks would partly lead one to suppose your meaning?

Besides, once having got a race you must not make too much of climate, to the overlooking of the wonderful persistence of any variety when close bred. See the Jews: the nose remains hooked, etc., under all climates.

Again, in your last sentence. When you unscientific people take up a scientific principle you are apt to make too much of it, to push it to conclusions beyond what is warranted by the facts. But, because a particular race has persisted in Egypt, how do you know that it is the only race capable of perpetuating itself?

If there had been a large infusion of different people in Egypt, and if they had exterminated the old race, do you not suppose this would have established itself, perpetuated itself, and that its particular adaptations to the climate would have been different from that of the present race?

If you cut off all future immigration into North America, would the Indians resume possession of the country? or else our descendants become a copper-colored race?

Enough for the present. When you have cracked these nuts, send me, if you please, another sheet.

Ever yours cordially,
Asa Gray.

Cambridge, July 6, 1863.

Dear Brace,—Yours of 20th ult. came just as J. was off for New Haven and I getting ready to go to her aid.

We came back only on Thursday, or rather Friday morning. My hands so full that I could not write to Darwin, to whom I owe a long letter, till to-night. I will now inclose your note.

It would be very like a chemist to think that external influences will explain everything. But I presume he believes that peculiarities are heritable. If he does, then he thinks he can explain, or will be able to explain, the origination of variations. I cannot, that is, to any extent, and do not expect to. When he will show us how external influences actually worked to change a peach into a nectarine, I will consider his proposition.

If he means by “external influences” whatever has brought about the change, very well. I, of course, allow that every variation has a cause, a physical cause. But it seems to me you may as well say that conception and the production of a normal offspring is the result of “external influences” as the production of an abnormal (variant) offspring.

But there is no use writing at random.

You ask me whether I adhere to my notions before expressed, without at all showing me how they have been impugned.

I should rather expect Guyot to indorse Beaumont; a theological bias would act strongly.

But I rely most on Lartet, Coulon, and Pictet, for the age of deposit. Yet it may still be an open question....

Darwin, on account of his health, has to live away from London, and is a recluse. I give no letters to him, least of all to a lively inquisitive Yankee like Beecher, who would give him a fit of dyspepsia at once, from mere excitement.

I have the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg honorary membership; quite a feather, as they are choice and few. Diploma just come.

Ever yours,
A. Gray.

TO R. W. CHURCH.

May 7, 1861.

It was very good of you to write to me (by your letter of 28th of March) when I believe that a former letter of yours was still unacknowledged by me. Your letters always give me much pleasure.

What you say of “Essays and Reviews” seems to me most sensible and well considered; the best thing I have read about the book, viz., that, “with many good and true things in it, it is a reckless book,” and that some of the writers had not taken the trouble to clear up their own thoughts and to form orderly and consistent notions before publishing upon such delicate topics.

I have not yet read the book; have only looked it over, and read some of the criticisms. When I have a few days’ leisure in the country, in July, I mean to read it carefully. After the flurry is over, I hope the book will receive the proper kind of handling in England, by the proper men. I wish you would think it in your way to write an essay upon some of the points at issue, upon which inconsiderate views are likely to be taken upon either side.

I confess to a strong dislike of Baden Powell’s writings. He seems to have had a coarse, materialistic, non-religious mind; at least, he is not the sort of man I should select to illustrate the delicate relations between religion and science.

I am gratified, also, by your apprehending the spirit and object of my essay[46] on Darwin so much better than many who write to me about it. All it pretends to is to warn the reckless and inconsiderate to state the case as it is; to protest against the folly of those who would, it would seem, go on to fire away the very ramparts of the citadel, in the defense of needless outposts; and, as you justly remark, to clear the way for a fair discussion of the new theory on its merits and evidence. We must use the theory a while in botany and in zoölogy, and see how it will work; in this way a few years will test it thoroughly. I incline to think that its principles will be to a certain extent admitted in science, but that, as Darwin conceives it, it will prove quite insufficient.

As to our country, we have been, as a people, undergoing a steady demoralization for the last fifteen or twenty years, the natural end of which lately seemed to be that we should crumble into decay almost without an effort at recovery. If it had been sought under legal forms and in a less outrageous spirit, I think the North would have consented to the peaceful separation of the cotton States, and we should have prospered by the separation. But it has become clear that there would be no living with such a people as our neighbors would be, so long as they allow themselves (against the better judgment of the best) to be ruled by the political demagogues who now hold sway over them. It is clear we must fight, and we had better do it now, and fight for the integrity of the country and the enforcement of the laws. So we are fairly and justly in it, and we are going to conquer the South. They have appealed to force. They must abide the consequences of the appeal, and, we trust, God will help the right. So you may expect to hear of stirring times here. Ever, with great regard,

Yours most cordially,
Asa Gray.

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

January 25, 1861.

The Union is overthrown by a conspiracy which would have been kept within bounds, and soon shut itself up, if the border slave States cared enough for the Union to take hold, or even allow it to be arrested or checked. But no, they must become insane, like the rest, and help it along. Virginia will not take hold and second Kentucky and Tennessee, fighting nobly by Johnson, Crittenden, etc., declare against treason first, and then arrange terms, which are all ready, all they want, for composing the difficulties.

But Cottondom will not have peace and union, and Virginia, etc., are foolish enough to help their game. That the border Southern States will be the principal sufferers will be only a righteous retribution for their guilt.

If, in fact, we only belong to a partnership which any of the partners can dissolve at will, then the Union is not worth having. We must do the best we can without it, and if Missouri would prosper, she should stay with us.

If peace is wanted, the reasonable proposition, “no more territory to be acquired without a majority of two thirds of the States,” would give it. With that you may do what you like, or rather what you can, in the present Territories. No more of the continent is worth having, either for North or South.

Posterity will judge rightly, and Toombs, Cobb, Floyd, etc., will go down to their graves as base, dishonored traitors.

My fighting days are over, anyway. I have had the misfortune to lose the end of my left thumb, by an accident, just at the base of the nail.

May 25, 1861.

I am very glad to hear from you. I believe I have a former letter from you unanswered. Lately I mailed to you some botanical pamphlets, one containing the Xantus California plants.[47] But in these times I had not the heart to write you. You have seen your dream of peace policy fall in pieces, and Douglas coming out for the war. You have also seen enough to perceive that under the let-alone policy Missouri also would have seceded, under the same discipline which has been applied elsewhere. In which event, let alone, St. Louis would dwindle to a country village.

No, the first and paramount duty of a country is to protect and preserve itself against destruction. The Constitution and government must be maintained, and treason put down if we are able to do it.

If it can’t be done, then, and then only, may we submit to disintegration.

Stick firm to the Union, and Missouri will come out well. I am sorry for the bloodshed at St. Louis. Your population is hard to manage. But Harney, as you say, is doing well, and I expect to see your State soon a loyal one. Even those with secession affinities must soon see their own interests. It is impossible there should be peace,—peace is not worth having till the rebellion, based on a plot formed years ago, is put down.

If you think me belligerent, I am nothing to Agassiz. Of course we shall all suffer severely. But better to suffer in devotion to the Union than prosper in petty fragments.

Enough of this. May God preserve and keep you, and let us hear from you when you can; for we take great interest in you, and know your position is a trying one.

Cambridge, August 6, 1861.

My dear Engelmann,—As soon as I got clear of college work, my wife and I started off (on the 12th of July) to visit my mother and friends in Oneida County, New York, where we rode and drove about in the fine air, over a most beautiful country, and enjoyed ourselves to the full, to her great advantage; also mine. Then we cut across the State to Pennsylvania, visited the coal region of north Pennsylvania; traveled very leisurely; passed through New York, seeing the Torreys three hours, and so to Litchfield, Connecticut, where Mrs. G. is left, and I am at home, to set to work again, having done nothing in botany except to teach since last April.

Now I am going to set to work as soon as correspondence is cleared off.

I found here also a letter from Dr. Parry,[48] and have named the specimens in both, sending the answer to you for forwarding, also Dr. Parry’s letter to me.

He can’t miss it if he keeps at work between Denver and Salt Lake, climbing to truly alpine regions as often as he can.

Dr. Hooker sent me last spring a fine cast of a bust of Robert Brown. To-day I have also from him a splendid one of his father, Sir William. Tell Fendler that Mr. Shaw should procure both if possible for the Library of Hort. Bot., Missouri.

What next? A young gardener has found a locality of Calluna vulgaris, covering almost an acre, within twenty-five miles of Boston; a case to add to Scolopendrium, Marsilea, etc., but most of all, striking and unexpected. It grows in low ground, and has every appearance of being indigenous.

August 27.

I hope and trust that Frémont will be strong enough to keep the war out of your neighborhood. The citizens of Missouri ought to volunteer in such numbers as to keep the rebels out of the State and keep the State true and firm in the Union. It is the cheapest and most honorable way, and will save property, avoid distress, etc.

This rebellion is certainly going to be put down, no matter at what cost, and property at St. Louis will be worth more than ever yet before you and I reach three score and ten.

November 11.

I think very little of Unionists who have been “made Secessionists” by anything. What matter whether you have one fifth, one tenth, or four fifths Unionists, if they will not fight to put down Secessionists,—they might as well be Secessionists out and out. Maryland and Missouri will not and must not be allowed to secede or to do seceders’ work, cost what it will. And it is a great blessing to them that we restrain them. The Union must be preserved; suffering is a very small matter in comparison—all must take their part, and the rebels must suffer hard till they give up. We are only beginning to fight. If Missouri wanted security she should have put down her secessionists herself with the strong hand, at the beginning. So of Kentucky. But she has been forced to find out and feel her duty and her honor, and to act.

God save the Union, and confusion to all traitors.

TO DANIEL CADY EATON.

Cambridge, October 4, 1861.

Your three parcels and letter of October first have duly come. I believe I never answered your note of August 28.

I can’t abide writing letters nowadays. But I think often of you. You are happy in being able to do something direct. I wish I could. Find me a useful place in the army, and I will go at once.

My wife and I have scraped up $550, all we can scrape, and lent it to the United States. I am amazed that people do not come forward with their money—those that can’t go to fight. I wish I could do both....

I have to-day a letter from Wright, September 4. He is of late botanizing with more spirit than formerly.

A sailing-vessel is up here for Santiago. I shall write by it, the United States mail by steamer being so interrupted, and perhaps send some publications, newspapers, etc. But I shall leave for you to send the “Flora of the British West Indies,” as you suggest. I could not spare my copy....

I hope this taking up of large transport vessels means something, and something prompt and thorough.

Thus far one is sick and sad, so little is done.

I had some hopes that your good father would be put at the head of the Commissary Department. I trust he will get promotion somewhat according to his deserts anyhow. Oh for faithful and honest officers and officials!...

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

Cambridge, January 15, 1862.

I do not like to write to you much about the war, and that is much reason why I have not sooner replied to yours of December 9.

My brother-in-law and his cousin are both officers in Burnside’s expedition, which we expect will do something.

Mrs. Gray and I send warmest New Year greetings to you and Mrs. E., and hope you may feel all right and country safe in 1863.

February 20.

Bravo for Illinois, to which victory at Fort Donelson is due, and bravo for Tennessee and Alabama full of Union men! Does not your old Union blood rise? Pray, now drop all your let-treason-alone, do-nothing-disorganizing notions, and go in for the country, the whole country, reinstate it first, and then we will all go in and make it what it should be. The ungenerous conduct of England shows what a condition we should be in as a fraction, and she playing off one portion against the other, and bullying both.

I pray Congress to put on taxes, five per cent direct on property and income, and heavy indirect besides. What is property! I would fight till every cent is gone, and would offer my own life freely; so I do not value the lives or property of rebels above my own. God bless you.

May 22.

A most lovely spring here. We all flourish and prosper, and rejoice in the strengthening of our national power, and advancing restoration of the Union, with hopes of hanging leaders of the rebellion, exiling a good many, and pardoning all the rank and file who will come back with a good grace to their allegiance. If they will not, let them beware! Væ victis to such.

The country is to be kept in the Union. If the people choose to stay, let them, and peace be with them. If they wish to emigrate, very well. The North, aided by immigrating Teutons, has great colonizing power, and we can rapidly settle Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi, etc.

There, this is enough for the present to rile you.

As to Euphorbias, the published names here must take precedence to unpublished names of Shuttleworth, etc.

Ever your most peaceful friend,

Asa Gray.

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

Cambridge, October 10, 1860.

Thanks for very interesting letter of September 10. I am much pressed now, or would write a long gossiping letter. The bound copy of “Origin” is just received from Murray. Many thanks....

I believe I have seen a pod or two of Horseradish; but they are rare. Your germinations show curious resemblance of dimorphic-crosses with hybrid-crosses, as shown by Naudin; very interesting and capital points for you.

January (?), 1862.

I imagine it is now universally felt here that if we do not do it [i. e., carry on the fighting] we shall have to eat much dirt; that the establishment of a rival power on our long southern line of the free States, to be played off against us, is not to be submitted to if it can be prevented at any sacrifice. God help us, indeed, if our honorable existence is to have no better safeguard than the generosity or sense of justice of more powerful nations! As to slavery, the course of things is getting to meet your views, as it is clear must be, if the South continues obstinate. If they give up war they may save their institution in their own States, to have the chance of abolishing it themselves in the only safe and easy way, with time and the gradual competition of white labor. But obstinate resistance will surely bring on wide-sweeping manumission.

You see that we are not going to have war [with England] at present. And it appears that the decision of our government will be as unitedly and thoroughly sustained by the whole people as if it had been the other way; contrary to Mr. Russell’s prediction, and to our dear friend Dr. Boott’s, who writes about our “mob” in a way he would not if he were here to see. Look at an English mob urging up their government so that they felt obliged to back up their demands, with a menacing force on our borders; and making such a peremptory demand as you justly say, “entirely on Wilkes’ acting as judge;” a matter which our government would as promptly concede as yours could ask.

Seemann[49] wrote me that the general belief at the clubs and in the City was that our government wanted to get into war with England for an excuse to give up the South. A pretty idea they must have of our wisdom and discretion! Dear Boott is firmly convinced that we have all along been trying to quarrel with England. The belief here is nearly universal the other way, and those who like England best, and perhaps the coolest and best-informed men, have been more and more dissatisfied as time went on.

What has caused this lamentable state of things, this complete misunderstanding? Plainly this: the secessionists in England have adroitly managed the matter and led public opinion in various lines, but all in one direction, inimical to us; and they did not think it too great a stretch to make John Bull believe that we were insane enough to want an English quarrel. In this they have been ably seconded by a few papers here, mainly by those whose loyalty is deeply suspected, and whose influence is as nothing; which are nearly as scurrilous as the “Saturday Review,” with no redeeming ability, and you have the result.

Will the evidence that this mail carries satisfy the English that we want to live in peace with them?

But as to good feeling, I am afraid it is too late to expect that.

We were hurt at first by your putting our rebels on the same footing as a government with which yours was in most amicable relations,—and by the general assumption at once that we were gone past redemption, by the failure to see that the power had gone from the hands of those who were always making trouble with your government in some petty way or other, etc., till I think it is generally believed that the governing influence in England desires to have us a weak and divided people, and would do a good deal to secure it.

I am sorry to say that this is the general feeling; and this is now very much intensified.

The feelings of many are very hostile, and they would like to be strong that they might show it. Those of others, who have been exceedingly fond of England, always defending her when possible, and these are mine, are, that we must be strong to be secure and respected,—natural selection quickly crushes out weak nations; that we have tried long enough to have intimate relations between the governments, or the peoples in general. Naturalists, etc., being enlightened people, can be as intimate as they like; but nationally let each say, “God bless you, and let us see as little of each other as possible,” each going our own way.

Well, enough of this.

Some of the representations of us in the English papers would be amusing if they did not now do so great harm. One would think it was generally thought that there was no law and order here, nor gentlemanly conduct, nor propriety of deportment among the poorer and laboring people. I wish you could come and see. As to such things, and as to intelligence, education, etc., I have sometimes thought of the picture one could draw from individual cases. Take one—very confidentially—for I would not hurt a really good fellow by exposing his ignorance of what he might be expected to know. Here we lately had a Cambridge graduate (F. L. S., and godson of an English baronet) who in one conversation let us know most frankly that he had no idea where Quito was, or that there were two houses of Congress in the United States, and was puzzled to know whether Boston, United States, time was faster or slower than that of Greenwich!...

February 18, 1862.

Accept a hasty line at the present, when I am busy above measure.

Thanks for the Primula paper, which I have barely looked over.

I do hope that you and the other fourteen of your household are out of bed and done with influenza.

As I have not given you up notwithstanding your very shocking principles and prejudices against design in nature, so we shall try to abide your longitudinarian defection. I suppose it is longitude, and I am sorry to see that there is a wide and general desire in that meridian that we (United States) should fall to pieces. But the more you want us to, the more we won’t, and the more important it appears to us that we should be a strong and unbroken power. God help us, if we do not keep strong enough, at whatever cost now it may be, to resist the influence of a country which looks upon the continuation of our steady policy to protect and diversify our domestic industry as a wrong and sin against it. No, no, we must have our own way. But the triumph of the Republicans was the political destruction of the very people who were always making trouble with England, and, if you would only let us and have some faith in the North, we should have been permanently on the best of terms.

What you complain of in the Boston dinner[50] was indeed lamentable; such men should not have talked bosh, even at a little private ovation, and we have reason to know some of them were heartily ashamed of it as soon as they saw it in print. It was immediately spoken of here, by influential people, some of whom refused to attend the dinner, and in at least one paper, in a tone like your own. It was really as bad as the speeches of some members of Parliament, and worse because it was foolish.

The fact is, a set of cunning fellows on both sides of the water (but here utterly characterless) have contrived to make both English and Yankees believe that each was bent upon quarreling with the other.

Your thinking of me “as an Englishman” would once have been a compliment, and is what from my well-known feelings and expressions I have passed for among my friends here. Had the North gone on giving in to the South as for years past, I should have been one, at least in residence, just as soon as I could have got out of the country. I thank God, it has been otherwise, and that I have a country to be proud of, and which I will gladly suffer for, if need be. With all its weakness and follies (and I know them well) I go for my country, and to be friendly with those we ought to be on good terms with. I am cured of some illusions. We shall do very well, and the two countries will be on the best of terms when we are strong; till then we must not expect it.

If it is the old question of struggle for life, good feeling has not much to do with it: the weak must go to the wall, because it can’t help it. “Blessed are the strong, for they shall inherit the earth.”

My wife, who is loath to strike you from her books, begs you to make allowances for the people here, who were so very cocky at having caught two such ineffable scamps as Mason and Slidell, whom we have reason to hate with perfect hatred; that they thought of nothing else, and did not mean to be saucy to England. But you have made us sore, there is no denying it. We did not allow enough for longitude.

Her former message did not refer to Boott (though he is unfortunately influenced by longitude; but is a Yankee born), nor to Hooker, who, Gallio fashion, cares for none of these things; thinks us unwise for fighting, I presume; but we perfectly agree to say nothing about such matters. It is odd that you all fail to appreciate that it is simply a struggle for existence on our part, and that men will persist in thinking their existence of some consequence to themselves, though you prove the contrary ever so plain; and will strike or grasp or kick, right and left, in an undignified way sometimes; which the safe and sound bystander, coolly looking on, may not appreciate, not sharing his feelings, telling him the world will get on quite as well without him; yet he somehow does not quite like it.

March 6.

I have your note of February 16, about Melastomaceæ. The test of a good theory is said to be its power of predicting. If your speculations lead you to predict the style curved to one side in Melastomaceæ, and the prediction is verified, that will be a great matter in your favor. Why, you are coming out so strong in final causes that they should make a D. D. of you at Cambridge!

I shall be pleased if I can help you about Rhexia. R. Virginica grows not far from here, and I will set to watching it next summer. But I fear it may not help you, as it is stated in our “Flora of North America” to have “anthers uniform.” I see, however, the phrase, “style somewhat declined,” in the character; which must be looked to. The character was drawn wholly from dried specimens. I have good details from fresh ones drawn by Mr. Sprague, but cannot just now lay hands on them.

Freely point out anything else you want looked at. I have now a very zealous pupil, who will be glad to be intrusted with looking up plants and observing.

Ever yours, cordially,
Asa Gray.

There is some jolly science in the “Saturday Review,” now and then; as in December 28, p. 665, where we are informed that icebergs “are formed by the splashing of the waves on the coast of Labrador.”

Mill being “the greatest logician in England,” I send you an American reprint of a specimen of his logic, which I know you will like.

We are very sad here at the death of the president of our university,[51] who had also many warm friends in England.

March 31.

Yours of the 15th came this evening. To-morrow I am busy all day in college (where I began my course this year with lectures on Fertilization, developing your views on orchid-insect fertilization, dimorphism, etc., etc., to an interested class!), so I must drop a line for you into a letter for Boott, for Wednesday’s post.

A friend has just handed me Morell’s new book, which, looking at psychology from the physiological side, I see brings up several notions which have been turning over in my mind for some years. He is coming out a good Darwinian, I see, and is quite of my way of thinking about design. You see I am determined to baptize [“The Origin of Species”], nolens volens, which will be its salvation. But if you won’t have it done, it will be damned, I fear....

Things move on here, on the whole, very well.

Yes, I will promise not to hate you; quite the contrary!

Our sensitiveness as to England was the natural result of the strong filial feeling on our part. It was very undignified, I dare say. But I think we are getting bravely over it, and getting really not to care what the Old Country may think or say, so it lets us alone.

As to Rebeldom, there is now hardly any State that we have not got some foothold in.

I do not do so much scientific work as before the war, but still I keep pottering away. From now till July, I can expect to do little besides my college duties. Ever, dear Darwin, your cordial friend and true Yankee,

A. Gray.

May 18.

Yesterday came by post the sheets B-I of your Orchid book.

This evening (Sunday) I have opened the parcel and read introduction and chapter i. What a charming book it is! You are right in issuing it in this form. It would be a sin not to do so.

I fear, though, that no publisher would reprint it here; though I may, on reading farther, conclude to offer it to the Appletons, who should have the refusal. But it will surely be popular in England, where orchids are popular and the species known to most intelligent and educated people. I hope soon to get the other sheets. I am perfectly delighted with O. pyramidalis, and must extract the whole account of its fertilization for “Silliman’s Journal.”

Our only orchis, that is, O. spectabilis, I brought last summer from western New York, and planted. I shall in a week have three or four spikes coming into flower, and I will cover one and leave the others exposed. They are in a wooded part of the garden, like their natural habitat. The rest of our Ophrydeæ are Habenarias (Platanthera).

I must recur to your letter about Cypripedium and see what you wanted of it, that is, what observation.

If there be any adaptation, be it ever so pretty, I shall never see it without your direction. What a skill and genius you have for these researches! Even for the structure of the flower of the Ophrydeæ I have to-night learned more than I ever knew before.

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

Cambridge, April 26, 1861.

My dear Friend,—My duties in the university at this season are very pressing. Besides, we are now opening a war, upon the determination of which our very existence depends, and upon which we are to concentrate all our strength and soul, so I have no time nor heart to write of botany just now....

Ever, dear De Candolle, yours most cordially,

Asa Gray.

December 16.

We do not often exchange letters now, and in these for us trying times in the United States, though far removed from the actual scenes of war, and not much interrupted in my botanical studies, except by distracting thoughts, I write as few letters as I can. The unfriendly attitude of England gives us much concern. Were it not for that, it is thought we should soon put an end to our rebellion. But I will not write of such matters now.

July 2, 1862.

No fear about our army, now so great. It is largely composed of materials such as nothing but a high sense of duty could keep for a year in military life. It will dissolve like last winter’s snow when no more needed.

While I write, a great battle is in progress, decisive if we gain it and take the rebel capital, simply prolonging the strife if we do not. We can raise at once another army if need be; and yet another. Indeed 300,000 more men are now to be accepted, to recruit our ranks and make a sure thing of the result.

Confident of our cause, we expect confidently the favor of Providence....

What a charming book is that of Darwin on orchid fertilization!

TO CHARLES WRIGHT.

Cambridge, April 17, 1862.

I am at work in college now, you know, and it is very hard work. This last vacation I had to make a new edition and new additions to my “Manual,” etc., and to do it in a hurry, and I have at length, for the first time, found out that I am growing old. In fact I broke down under it, and have injured my health a little.... I doubt if I ever recover the spring and vim of former times. But we shall see....

My hard work has got correspondence all horridly behindhand, and determined me to draw in my horns, and drop a good deal of it. My desk has long been so covered deep with unanswered letters, etc., that I have abandoned it, and now sit over on the other side of the table.

If I sit down and answer a letter right off the day it comes, as I am now doing with yours, and as I do with purely business letters, etc., then it is safe. If I add it to the heap, it is a gone case, and I fear will never be really answered.

Eaton, too, as you know, has been very hard worked, in his father’s office.

Well, there is no State now in some part of which the star-spangled banner does not float. Lincoln is a trump, a second Washington, steady, conservative, no fanatical abolitionist. Foote, of your State of Connecticut, is putting down his foot on the Mississippi. McClellan is to fight a great battle at Yorktown. Another bloody battle may be fought near Corinth, Mississippi. New Orleans will soon be ours, please God, and then this wicked rebellion will be done for. I pray God I may live to see the end of it, and the States brought back, quietly if they will, forcibly if they must.

I know it will rejoice your heart to see the thing done. And it will be worth all it costs.

Come now, here is a good long letter for a man as tired as I to write, who has been five or six hours in lecture-room, working hard.

August 1.

Here is a bit of reading for you,—substitute for letters, which in truth I have not surfeited you with lately. Who can write letters in these trying times?...

Last spring my health felt pretty seriously impaired. But by end of June I was able to diminish my college work a little, and take the rest easier, and so now I feel very much better, more like my old self, and I am beginning to clear off my table that I may get at work again on that everlasting South Pacific Exploring Expedition.

There is a charming book out, by Darwin, on the fertilization of orchids by insects. It will open your eyes to most curious things. I have verified much myself here, and made observations which Darwin regards as very interesting. I send you a copy of the book through Eaton, as a present.

Any observations or notes you make I will send to Darwin.

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

July 2, 1862.

I am glad if my off-hand orchid notes interest you, or prove of the least use. I am daily expecting a copy to send you of my notice of the early chapters of your book. I will continue in the ensuing number. And whatever of the notes I send you seem to you worth touching upon, you have only to indicate them, and send back my memoranda, and I will take them up. But as to Cypripediums, I should like to have an opportunity of examining them (except C. acaule) more at large, and growing.

A week from to-morrow, I expect to be able to leave Cambridge, to go down, with my examination papers to read, to my beau-père’s place on the shore, for a few days. Then I will try to look up and bring home living Rhexia Virginica; and also I expect to have a look at Calopogon pulchellus, with its strong bearded labellum. And I hope it will not be too late to get plenty of Mitchella repens, which my pupils do not bring me in as they ought. I want to see if long-styled stigma and short differ, and also the pollen of the two, as they do in Houstonia, of which I hope I sent you Rothrock’s[52] observations. At least I will send when he has completed them.

Precocious fertilization in the bud was much noticed here very long ago by Torrey, in Viola, Specularia, etc., etc., also in Impatiens, about which see my “Genera Illustrata,” volume ii. I once mentioned it to you as good evidence of close fertilization. As to pollen-tubes of such, I have no observations of my own, but a memory or fancy that they were shown to me by Torrey. I will ask him, and have him look at Specularia.

As to the French lady’s translation and commentary on the “Origin,” I am not so much surprised. As I view it, there are only two sides to the main question. Very likely she takes one side in a thorough-going and consistent manner; and either she is right, or I am right, i. e., there is design in nature, or there is not. The no-design view, if one can bring himself to entertain it, may well enough lead to all she says, and we may very much admire how collision and destruction of least-favored brings about apparently orderly results,—apparent contrivances or adaptation of means to ends. On the other hand, the implication of a designing mind must bring with it a strong implication of design in matters where we could not directly prove it.

If you grant an intelligent designer anywhere in Nature, you may be confident that he has had something to do with the “contrivances” in your orchids.

I have just received and glanced at Bentham’s address, and am amused to see how your beautiful flank movement with the Orchid book has nearly overcome his opposition to the “Origin.”

The military simile above leads me to speak of your wonder that I can think of science at all in the midst of war. Well, first, we get used to it. Second, we need something to turn to, and happy are they who, forbidden to engage personally in the war (as I am ever itching to do), have something to turn to. Third, I do not do much, do nothing, in fact, except my college duties now for months, and that is the reason I have time to write to you, and be interested in all your doings.

If you suppose everything is paralyzed and desolate here, and the country greatly put back, read a very sensible letter of an Englishman in the “Spectator” of June 7. It is very just and true. We shall recuperate fast enough, and be better off than ever, as much prosperity as is good for us, and more solid, more independent, more self-contained, which is our great desideratum. Free trade be blowed; we must needs have high duties on imports, and it is better that we should. By these and by direct taxes—the tax-bill just passed—we shall have to pay over largely. Very well.

Just at present our prospects (viz., evening of July 3) are looking badly enough. McClellan has clearly been overmatched and driven to the wall, after very obstinate fighting, with very heavy loss on both sides. Whether it is retrievable with reinforcements, or whether the whole campaign has to be begun again against Richmond, is not yet clear. Anyway we have got to put shoulder to the wheel anew, and it may be done, we suppose, more easily and far more promptly than last year. All we ask is that Europe shall let us alone.

Enough for to-day.

Providence, R. I., July 29, 1862.

No more news in the orchids line. I am making two or three days of holiday, and yesterday I found a few specimens of Gymnadenia tridentata. But the flowers are too small to examine well with a hand lens. If they keep, I will take them back to Cambridge in a day or two and see what to make of them....

As to the country, you will see by this time that we have not the least idea of abandoning the struggle. We have learned only that there is no use trying any longer to pick up our eggs gently, very careful not to break any. The South forces us at length to do what it would have been more humane to have done from the first, i. e., to act with vigor, not to say rigor.

We shall be complained of for our savageness, no doubt, whereas we feel that our error has been all the other way. But the independence, the total indifference to English feeling which you recommended last year, has come at length; now we care nothing what Mrs. Grundy says.

Cambridge, September 22, 1862.

Your pleasant epistles of August 21 and September 4 are to be acknowledged, with thanks. But I have nothing in particular to communicate, except our hearty congratulations that your boy and Mrs. Darwin are recovering so well.

Tell Leonard that I was pleased both with his attention in writing and with the ocular proof of his convalescence in his being able so soon to use a pen. His requests shall be kept in view; the five-cent stamp I send now; dare say I shall sometime pick up the thirty and ninety, though I never saw the latter, nor the twelve, twenty, and twenty-four on envelopes (the twenty-four cent he must have already, as it is often used on my envelopes to you).

Bravo for Horace, whose illustration of Natural Selection as to the adders is capital. A chip of the old block, he evidently is.

I told you that Rothrock had gone to the war, and perhaps has already been under fire; probably not. I had intended that next spring he should do up Houstonia more perfectly, and work up this and some related matters for his thesis when he comes up for examination. But all this is broken up by his enlistment....

I have been lazy about all my writing, working all day at dry and dull systematic botany, which you anathematize. But if I get time to turn it over, I will say a few words on the last chapter of your Orchid book. But it opens up a knotty sort of question about accident or design, which one does not care to meddle with much until one can feel his way further than I can.

October 4, 1862.

I have just been reading Max Müller’s lecture on the Science of Language with much interest. But perhaps what has interested me most is, after all, his perfect appreciation and happy use of Natural Selection, and the very complete analogy between diversification of species and diversification of language. I can hardly think of any publication which in England could be more useful to your cause than this volume is, or should be. I see also with what great effect you may use it in our occasional discussion about design; indeed I hardly see how to avoid conclusion adverse to special design, though I think I see indications of a way out.

Depend on it, Max Müller will be of real service to you.

October 13.

I have been so much occupied that I deferred to the last moment to write out my second notice of your Orchid book for “Silliman’s Journal.” I wrote out Saturday evening what I could, and to-day have finished and sent off my manuscript to New Haven. The greater part consists of a record of some of my observations last summer, very hurriedly penned, and sent off. I trust you will be pleased, and will think that my little contributions cannot be better hatched than under your wings.

I hope that my young correspondent is fast recovering strength. Tell him that I have no more stamps for him yet, but shall pick up his desiderata one of these days.

I have some nice live roots of Cypripedium, two or three species to send you, and mean to send Mitchella.

How Hooker does praise up your book, in the “Gardener’s Chronicle!”

Cambridge, November 10, 1862.

It is refreshing to me that you find the special correspondent of the “Times” detestable.

Your comments upon our affairs always show such a good spirit that you need not fear even my wife’s “indignation.”

We are sorry that you suffer in England; but you must blame the rebels for it, not us, and your Manchester people should have looked earlier to India for cotton.

You don’t see, as you would if here, the total impossibility of coming to any terms of peace with the South, based on their independence. Before that can be they or we must be thoroughly beaten. You can’t be expected to see too, what seems plain to me, that you English would give us no end of trouble if we attempt a piecemeal existence. We must be strong enough to keep any Old-World power at bay. Then we shall behave pretty well, on the whole; surely so when the North is dominant and is fairly treated. “Seizing on Canada.” What do we want of Canada? When the South was aggressive and making slave States we often looked to the peaceful acquisition of Canada as desirable, as a counterpoise. But when we had “changed all that,”—and it is changed, and slavery limited, past all doubt, however the combat ends,—we no longer have use or need of Canada. If we get set up again, we have work enough at home, and our hands full for years; we shall be strong for defense, but weak for aggression. The ill-feeling to England will die out when we are well able to defend ourselves and our home interests.

It does seem 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.

I never thought anything of American institutions for England. Aristocracy is a natural and needful appendage to monarchy. You work out your own type, and you will liberalize fast enough, and leave us to do ours. We’ll make it do, with some jangling.

I wish we could be shut up, like the Japanese of old, for ten or twenty years, only with a weekly mail from you and Dr. Hooker. Well, well!

Ever yours cordially,
Asa Gray.

November 24.

About Max Müller; surely you can’t wonder that the attempt to account for the “first origin of language,” or of anything else, should be the “least satisfactory.”

The use that I fancied could be made of Max Müller’s book, or rather of the history of language, is something more than illustration, but only a little more; that is, you may point to analogies of development and diversification of language, of no value at all in evidence in support of your theory, but good and pertinent as rebutting objections urged against it.

Bishop Colenso’s book will make a noise in England; indeed, I have only read the notice in the “Athenæum.”

You detest the spirit of the “Times” quoad U. S. The “Athenæum” is just as bad in its little penny-trumpet way, every chance it can get, from the first. Can you be much surprised that we return dislike with interest? But we are pleased to find there are sensible and fair writers, such as Cairnes and Mill.

No, dear Darwin, we don’t scorn your joining in the prayer that we daily offer that “God would help our poor country,” and I know and appreciate your honest and right feeling.

I see also, from the English papers I read, how you must picture us as in the extreme of turmoil and confusion and chaos. But if you were here, you would open your eyes to see everything going on quietly, hopefully, and comfortably as possible. I suppose we do not appreciate our miseries. We accept our misfortunes and adversities, but mean to retrieve them, and would sink all that we have before giving up. We work hard, and persevere, and expect to come out all right, to lay the foundations of a better future, no matter if they be laid in suffering. That will not hurt us now, and may bring great good hereafter.

I never saw, and have scarcely heard of, Miss Cooper’s book you ask after. She is the daughter of the late J. Fenimore Cooper, the novelist. The village she describes must be Cooperstown, New York, in the county adjacent to that in which I was brought up,—a region which, every time I visit it, I say it is the fairest of lands, and the people the happiest.

Oh, as to the weeds; Mrs. Gray says she allows that our weeds give up to yours. Ours are modest, woodland, retiring things, and no match for the intrusive, pretentious, self-asserting foreigners. But I send you seeds of one native weed which, corrupted by bad company, is as nasty and troublesome as any I know, namely, Sicyos angulatus; also of a more genteel Cucurbitacea, Echinocystis lobata (the larger seeds). Upon these, especially upon the first, I made my observation of tendrils coiling to the touch. Put the seeds directly into the ground; they will come up in spring, in moist garden soil.

My observations were made on a warm, sunny day. I doubt if you have warmth and sunshine enough in England to get up a sensible movement.

My note about them is in “Proceedings of the American Academy,” iv., p. 98, reprinted in “Silliman’s Journal,” March, 1859, p. 277. I must own that upon casually taking them up since, I never have obtained such very good results as upon two days of August, 1858.

Upon gourds affecting each other’s fruits, I have made no observations at all. I have only referred to that, as a well-known thing, at least, of common repute here, and then referred to maize, where the soft sweet-corn, when fertilized by hard yellow-corn, the grain so fertilized takes the character of the fertilizer. My note about it is in Academy “Proceedings,” vol. iv., I think. You have the volumes (which I have not in reach now), and can find it by the index. It does not amount to much. Nothing on maize I know of except Bonafous’ folio volume. I am going to get and send you grains of four or five sorts of maize. About the involucrate form, I wrote in my last.

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

Cambridge, 14th October, 1862.

Dear Engelmann,—Never mind turmoil. It will come out right. I go against the abolition wing, but support the President in his Proclamation.

If the rebels continue obstinate, that is only a question of time. Of that, as a military measure, and of the expediency, the President of the United States is the sole judge, and in time of war he is to be supported heartily. I myself do not see clearly that the time had come. But I have a notion that the President knows better than I.

As you like Judge Parker, I will send you an article written before the Proclamation came out. You will like it, all but the last part, the bitter end. I would continue the war, if necessary, to the sweeping of all rebeldom bare. And that appears to be the sober sentiment of the country.

If Judge Parker, etc., had let their convention alone, we would have ousted Sumner for a wiser man. But now I fear that Sumner will be returned to the Senate.

You had better in Missouri abolish slavery and take United States bonds in indemnity. You will never do better.

TO CHARLES WRIGHT.

October 13, 1862.

Both Torrey and Eaton speak of having your photograph. You cut me, I suppose, because I am such a poor correspondent! I am afraid I deserve it, but what can a poor fellow do in such times as these?...

A fruit, one of a dozen ripened here this season in the Garden, has such a tropical look and taste that it reminded me of you. It is Asimina triloba! Tastes like a rich custard into which a piece of scented soap has fallen....

General Stuart with his cavalry has been cutting all round McClellan’s army again. Next time, I expect they will make a circuit as far round as Boston, or at least Connecticut, and carry off the horses. They are more in earnest than we are; but we shall use them up at length.

November 14.

Here I was this afternoon, moiling over your plants, copying out Grisebach’s manuscripts for the printer (for the printer won’t touch the Dutchy-looking thing; and besides, I have additions to make, etc.), when I just happened to remember that to-morrow is Havana mail, and that I was by all means to write to you to-day. There is still time, so here goes.

First, can’t you make some arrangement, while you are at this end of Cuba, to receive a Yankee newspaper by mail; say to the address of Don José Blain, or some Havana address. If you can arrange it that it is not stopped, I will send you papers regularly; say the little “Boston Herald,” small, soon read, democratic, patriotic, or others, from time to time....

As to collecting still, I should say, Yes, go on, in a gradual and cheap way, i. e., do not make very heavy outlays, as long as you are in the country; at least till next summer. For we cannot get the war done until late next spring (except in Texas).

If you can do as much for western as for eastern Cuba, it will be a good thing....

Meanwhile I have money enough for you, if you can only get it....

But how can you get it at present rates? Or how can I get it to you? If greenbacks would pass there as here, it would be easy enough.

Is there not some Yankee product that I could ship to you that Blain or Lescaille wants, sewing-machines, agricultural implements, chairs? So we might save the loss on exchange. I will send you anything, from a mouse-trap to a wheelbarrow!

You have a letter from me which must have reached you soon after yours of October 25, saying that my last was eighty-five days old! Indeed, you ought to have had it then....

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

January 27, 1863.

I have been far too busy to write letters; have been interrupted, too, by visitors, etc....

You “wish to heaven the North did not hate us so.” We equally wish the English did not hate us so. Perhaps we exaggerate the ill will in England against us. You certainly over-estimate that of the United States against England, which an influential part of your press exaggerates and incites for the worst purposes. But, after all, after the first flurry, we think and say very little about you, and shall live in peace with you, if you will let us. There should have been, and might have been, the most thorough good will between us. I do not think it is all our fault that it is not so.

In reply to your question:—

If oak and beech had large, colored corolla, etc., I know of no reason why it would be reckoned a low form, but the contrary, quite. But we have no basis for high or low in any class, say, dicotyledons, except perfection of development or the contrary in the floral organs, and even the envelopes; and as we know these may be reduced to any degree in any order or group, we have really, that I know of, no philosophical basis for high and low. Moreover, the vegetable kingdom does not culminate, as the animal kingdom does. It is not a kingdom, but a commonwealth; a democracy, and therefore puzzling and unaccountable from the former point of view.

I have just read De Candolle’s paper on oaks and species, and origin. Well, he has got on about as far towards you as I have. It is clear enough that, as I thought at first, derivation of species is to be the word, and natural selection admitted. The only question is, whether this is enough.

Ever your attached friend,
A. Gray.

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

Cambridge, February 16, 1863.

I am disposed to join issue with you on the question of Linnæus’ definition of species. I have long pondered your discussion of the subject in “Géographie Botanique,” and still think, on the supposition of the fixity of species (which Linnæus of course had in view), that between “community of descent” and “likeness,” the former and not the latter is the fundamental conception in the idea of species. We may test this by inquiring whether of the two can be derived from the other. The likeness, I suppose, is the consequence of the community of descent. But, then, as the likeness is a thing of degrees, and, according to present probabilities, species may have only a relative and temporary fixity, your view will after all have the advantage; and the question of species will come to be metaphysical or logical, rather than natural-historical. The worst of all is that there will remain no objective basis or standard; and species will be what each naturalist thinks best so to consider!

I am pleased to know that the view of my article on the “Memoirs”[53] is well received by you. Readable articles are very needful, when they can be had, for a journal which, like Silliman’s, cannot exist without popular support. I promised an article of sixteen pages of this character; but I intended to enlarge more at the close upon the genius and influence of your father, and cite your parallel with Linnæus as portrayed by Fabricius. But I found that my pages were filled before I was aware of it, and I had to cut short, much too curtly. It left me with a somehow dissatisfied feeling. All your remarks about the difference between the profound and the prolific botanists, I agree to; and I think that both Linnæus and De Candolle had as much genius as Robert Brown....

Well, as to origin of species, you have now gone just about as far as I have, in Darwinian direction, and both of us have been led step by step by the facts and probabilities, and have not jumped at conclusions.

I shall be curious to see Mme. Royer’s book; Darwin has spoken of her.

Under my hearty congratulations of Darwin for his striking contributions to teleology, there is a vein of petite malice, from my knowing well that he rejects the idea of design, while all the while he is bringing out the neatest illustrations of it!

Did time allow, I should like to write at large upon these enticing topics....

TO W. J. HOOKER.

Cambridge, March 16, 1863.

I received this morning a letter from William Short, announcing to me the death of his lamented father, our excellent friend, Dr. C. W. Short, of Louisville, Kentucky, one of our oldest botanists, and one of the best of men and kindest of friends. He died on the 7th inst., of a typhoid fever, supervening on a severe cold.

I feel the loss very much. Although we never met, he was one of my most valued friends....

He always remembered his former correspondence with you with great interest, and was particularly pleased when, in my letter, I could give him news of you.

His herbarium, upon which he bestowed great pains and considerable expense, is conditionally bequeathed to the Smithsonian Institution.

Our botanical Nestor is Dr. Darlington. A few months since I had a letter from him written in as firm a hand as ever; but now he is prostrated by paralysis, which, however, leaves his mind clear. But he cannot remain much longer with us. Short and Darlington were both hearty and true Christian gentlemen.

April 28, 1863.

Your kind letter of the 6th inst. and the photograph were received with more gratification than I can well express. Both your handwriting and your carte de visite show you to be well and strong, and, please God, long may you so continue.

Your face looks fuller than a dozen years ago, and a bit older, it may be, but it recalls your friendly and kindly expression, and is the best substitute I can have for not seeing you again.

What I wrote of our Nestor, Dr. Darlington, as about to be removed from us, has come to pass. The good old man died, after much suffering from a paralysis, on Wednesday last, the 22d, as a newspaper slip has apprised me. He had reached the age of eighty-one. Unless we continue to rank Dr. Bigelow among the botanists, Dr. Torrey, and even myself, now count among the most advanced in age.

I am most happy to tell you that Dr. Torrey, whom I lately saw in New York, and who last week looked in upon us here for a day, is quite well.

Mrs. Greene is cheerful and busy in carrying out her husband’s bequest and desires, in favor of the Boston Natural History Society, to whom he left his herbarium and botanical library.

By Professor George Bond, a colleague and neighbor of mine, our distinguished astronomer, and a most worthy, amiable, and modest person, whom I hope you may see, I sent out to you a photograph of F. A. Michaux and of Adrien de Jussieu, which I thought you might like, and which I have just had made from daguerreotypes which I induced them to sit for in Paris in 1851. Bond will be delighted to see Kew again with its vast improvements.

Ever, dear Sir William, yours affectionately,

Asa Gray.

TO MRS. THOMAS P. JAMES.

Cambridge, April 30, 1863.

I had sent some while ago word to Miss Morris that I had a single seedling Darlingtonia, and should like to know if Dr. Darlington was in condition to be interested in it. But she thought the time had passed for that.

His memory will long be venerated. We, at least, shall not forget him.

Twenty years ago he had sent to me his selected epitaph, and had discussed it. It is natural and characteristic. I should take an interest in seeing such an inscription on his tombstone. But, entre nous, I should not fancy such an one on my own. I should select rather some simple line of Holy Writ, expressive of the Christian trust and faith, such as our friend died in.

I had lately been writing brief notices of several of our botanists, deceased, for the May number of “Silliman’s Journal” (as you see, I mail a copy just received); and at the time I felt that they probably would not be published before there would be another and more distinguished name to add.

I shall not wait for the year to come round, but I hope to draw up a brief tribute to his memory for the July number of “Silliman’s Journal.” So I should be much obliged to you for the dates and other particulars you kindly offer to furnish. I hope that autobiography which you are so fortunate as to possess is of such a character that it may be printed, and that you will give it along with a little memoir from your own pen. It will be quite in your way, and I would rather you should do it than any one else....

By the way, I may as well mention that Dr. Darlington told me that certain letters, etc., of Baldwin’s, which he could not print, as they were severe on Nuttall, should come into my possession after his own death. You will probably know if any bundle of papers is left, directed to my charge.

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

Cambridge, March 22, 1863.

My dear Darwin,—Argyle’s article on the Supernatural, to which you called my attention a long while ago, I never happened to see till to-day, when I have read it through. It is quite clever, not deep, but clear, and I think useful. I see no occasion for finding fault with him, except in his attempts now and then to direct a little odium against you, which is unhandsome, for his main points are those I hammered out in the “Atlantic,” etc.; indeed I see signs of his having read the same. But it is hardly fair of him, after expressing his complete conviction that where the operation of natural causes can be clearly traced, the implication of design, upon its appropriate evidence, is not thereby rendered less certain or less convincing, to go on to speak of derivation-doctrine in a way that implies the contrary.

Of course we believers in real design make the most of your “frank” and natural terms, “contrivance, purpose,” etc., and pooh-pooh your endeavors to resolve such contrivances into necessary results of certain physical processes, and make fun of the race between long noses and long nectaries!

March 23.

Dr. Wyman,[54] who is a sharp fellow, tells me that, on the authority of the historian Prescott, the Incas of Peru, for no one knows how long, married their sisters, to keep the perfect purity of the blood. Query: How did this strong case of close-breeding operate? Did they run out thereby? Wyman thinks there is no evidence of it.

If it is true, and the Incas stood it for a long course of generations, you must look to it, for it will bear hard against your theory of the necessity of crossing. If they run out, you will have a good case.

April 11.

You see that, at length, the thing is nearly done, and, to use the expression here, rebeldom is “gone up.”

You have long seen, I suppose, that I was right in saying there was but one possible end to the war; also that the continuance for a time or abolition of slavery depended simply on the rebels,—that if they obstinately and persistently resisted, slavery was thereby doomed.

It has been a long, weary, and trying work. But the country has had the needed patience and nerve, and the thing is done, once for all, at great cost, but to immense and enduring advantage.

You are the only Britisher I ever write to on this subject, and, in fact, for whose opinions about our country I care at all.

So I hasten to rejoice with you over the beginning of the end.

April 20.

You asked me to tell you, when I had read it, what I thought of Sir Charles Lyell’s book.[55] I have only to-day finished the perusal of the copy he kindly sent me, that is, all but half of the matter on glacial period, which I reserve till I can read it more attentively. Throughout it is a very interesting and to me a very satisfactory book. It is three books: 1. A capital résumé and examination of what we knew about the evidence of antiquity of man; no evidence we had not read of before, but very clearly presented, of course.

2. A treatise on the glacial period. Out of this I have much to learn, and must read it all again carefully; of a part I have not yet cut the leaves.

3. On transmutation matters. That part of the book I can judge somewhat of, and I declare it first-rate. It is just about what I expected, and is characteristic of the man. I think that you, and Hooker, are unreasonable in complaining of Lyell that he does not come out “flat-footed,” as we say, as an advocate of natural-selection transmutation. For, 1st, it is evident that though inclined strongly towards it he is by no means satisfied that natural selection will do all the work you put upon it. 2d, he very plainly implies nearly all you would have him say. And, 3d, he serves your cause (supposing it to be well-founded) quite as effectually, perhaps, by his guarded position, by his keeping the position of a judge rather than of an advocate, and by considering still the case as not yet ripe for a decision.

Very skillfully, too, has he presented the case of transmutation so as to commend it, as much as possible, to us orthodox people. (Huxley, I suppose, whose two books I have not seen, would put it in a way to frighten us off.) Indeed, I think he has shown remarkable judgment and taste, and will have much success in disarming prejudice. And this is all you could ask.

The chapter on language makes the points I supposed would be made, or some of them, but only dips in, leaving more to be said. But this is rather ticklish ground, for, if we are not careful here, you would get the better of us in this field quoad design.

If I had got the book three or four weeks earlier I should have worked in some notice of the last chapter into my review of De Candolle, etc., on Species, in the May number of “Silliman’s Journal.”

Now please do not think of being ill this spring, and passing all your valuable time, wasting it, at a water-cure.

I have really, as you see, nothing special to write of this week, and no time to read what I have hurriedly penned.

May 26.

Your letter on heterogeny is keen and good; Owen’s rejoinder ingenious. But his dissent from your well-put claims of natural selection to attention and regard is good for nothing except on the admission of the view that species are somehow derived genealogically; and this I judge, from various of Owen’s statements, that he really in his heart believes to be the case, and was (as I long ago intimated my suspicions) hunting about for some system of derivation, when your book came down upon him like a thunderclap.

Wyman, here, is greatly pleased with Huxley’s book on man’s place in nature. I have not even seen it.

Did you ever notice how prettily Iris is arranged for cross-fertilizing by bees, etc.?

Your Linum paper has long been here. But I have actually not had time to read it. I might have glanced at it. But I find it best to read only when I can do so with some attention.

Phyllotaxis: I have no notion in the world why the angular divergences should be of that series of numbers and not of others. Opposite leaves give (decussating) the angles. My puzzle has been to account for this system in cycles in leaves running into the system of decussating whorls in flowers (usually, almost universally). You will see the question by comparing in my “Botanical Text-Book” (not “Lessons”), pp. 236, 237, with chapter v., section 1; and you see I have drawn an illustration from it apropos to Falconer’s remark. But explaining the obscure by the obscure does not amount to much.

As to national affairs, how quarrelsome you English are. Here are we, cool and quietly occupied with our little affairs, never dreaming of harm from you, and your people are trying their prettiest to pick a quarrel with us, because we do what Historicus says the English have always done and will do again when the time comes, having Lord Stowell to back them! Tell me, who is Historicus in the “Times”? An able and most influential person evidently.

The government of England is now showing sense. Do not wonder that some wild talk is given to the air in this rough country, after what you have heard in the House of Commons, and read in the “Times,” etc. Am afraid we shall not like each other for a good while—the nations. But all shows I was right. We must carry out our little job, and hold the United States complete and develop material strength at any cost, or we could not live without eating more dirt than we like.

Boasting nonsense is pretty well knocked out of us by severe discipline and sad reverses, but the determination is stronger than ever.

Time up and paper full. Forgive my maundering, and believe me to be,

Ever your affectionate,
A. Gray.

June, [1863].

I am kept distractingly busy, so look for nothing of any use from me yet awhile.

Your Ohio case of law against marrying of cousins, I put to my neighbor, Professor Parsons, who had it looked up. He tells me there is no such law at all on the Ohio statute books, nor is there a trace of any law on the subject to be found in the laws of any State in the United States. He doubts if there can really be any statistics which tell on the point, because, first, the marriage of first cousins is a rare thing in this country; second, the United States decennial censuses do not afford any information on the matter; third, nor any of the [state] censuses that he knows of.

Pray, don’t run mad over Phyllotaxis! I can’t save you, I am sure.

George’s “Converging Sines” is the same, perhaps, as what Bravais was after. His memoir may help you (see “Botanical Text-Book,” p. 141, par. 248); or, if you want something thoroughly mathematical, consult Neumann, of Berlin, in some paper, which I have no reference to....

I am sorry you do not give a better account of yourself. Be careful and do not work too hard.

July 7.

My last from you is May 31.

I had arranged to reprint most of Bates on Mimetic Analogy in “Silliman’s Journal,” but my long review of A. de Candolle crowded it out. I then thought of a brief abstract, but have had no time to prepare it. I wrote remarks and arranged long extracts of your Linum paper, and insisted on it for the July number of “Silliman’s Journal.” But it, too, was laid over, not for anything I had, for I have little in the July number.

I like and agree to your remark that, in Bates’s Geographical Varieties, etc., we get about as near to seeing a species made as we are ever likely to get; and so believing, I think your gradual way more likely than Heer’s jumps.

Apropos to Heer, you ask me if it is not impossible to imagine so many and nice coadaptations as we see in orchids being formed all by a chance blow.

I reply, Yes, perfectly impossible to imagine (and much the same by any number of chance blows).

So I turn the question back upon you. Is not the fact that the coadaptations are so nice next to a demonstration against their having been formed by chance blows at all, one or many?

Here lies, I suppose, the difference between us. When you bring me up to this point, I feel the cold chill.

I have been doing nothing but attend to my daily work, and had got so fagged that I really thought I was about to have softening of the brain, or some other breakdown. But a week of respite, caused by the death of an aged relative of my wife’s,—a dear old soul,—taking us away from here perforce, has set me up very nearly, and now after a week more comes my vacation, and we are off into the quiet country for three weeks.

A little legacy of about £2,000 to my wife comes in opportunely to relieve us of anxiety for the future. We have no children (which I regret only that I have no son to send to the war), and this with a little income, rather precarious, of about £200 a year would support us in our very simple way, if I were to throw up my place here. But I cannot do that yet....

Look at Impatiens flowers; see if the most fertile “precociously fertilized” ones ever get crossed!

I have asked in three directions for seeds of the Specularia perfoliata. Inclosed are depauperate specimens.

It is pretty to see honey-bees cross-fertilize Locust (Robinia), much as you say of broom. One of my students has been noticing the way bees act on Kalmia.

Now for my best thing for to-day.

An orchid which I missed last year, Platanthera flava, I knew would be curious, for I remembered a strong protuberance on base of labellum, on the median line. I have not time left to describe it now, having been sadly interrupted, but it is pretty,—equal to anything you have yet seen in British orchids. The process turns proboscis of insect either to right or left, where it will slip into an imperfect ring (as seen from above) or deep groove (as seen from before), in which lies the disk, not flat but coiled up, ready to catch proboscis. It is like the eye of a needle to receive the thread.

Perhaps I will send you, or print, a sketch[56] of the thing.

I am waiting for Gymnadenia tridentata to come on.

But the post hour has come.

July 21.

Your latest is of the 26th ult. You need not worry! It never wearies nor bores me to write to you, in the off-hand way I do. I enjoy our correspondence too much to consent to curtail or interrupt it. I learn from you, here in this remote part of the world, a thousand things which I should not otherwise know at all. And you stimulate my mind far more than any one else, except, perhaps, Hooker. So please do not make a fuss, but let me go on in my own fashion, and send me your fresh and stimulating letters, whenever you are in the mood of it. I am now in my vacation, and already, having idled and dawdled a week or two, I am as well and hearty as possible, and in the best of spirits. We should leave home this week for three weeks’ run in the country, but the sickness of my wife’s nephew, Lieutenant Jackson of Massachusetts Cavalry, will keep us awhile, as, though not alarming, it might take a bad turn, and so I may not be in the country for a week or two yet. We shall see....

I have strong and fresh Drosera rotundifolia, and it will now turn in its bristles and stick the viscid gland fast to a fly, binding him fast on all sides with liliputian cords. But it is awfully slow about it,—say three or four hours, and the next day the leaf sometimes becomes involute and folds over or curves around the insect; but what good? If the fly is not stuck fast in alighting, no movement takes place to hold him till he has got away if he ever could. However, it is an indication of what is so effectually done in Dionæa.

Rotary movement of end of tendril-bearing stems is common, is it not, and well-known?

Any notes you will give me to print in “Silliman’s Journal,” I shall always delight in.

I have been reading Owen’s Aye-aye paper. Well, this is rich and cool! Did I not tell you in the “Atlantic,” long ago, that Owen had a transmutation theory of his own! It is your Hamlet, with the part of Hamlet left out! But as you say now, you don’t so much insist on natural selection, if you can only have derivation of species. And Owen goes in for derivation on the largest scale. You may as well lovingly embrace! Oh, it is rare fun!...

I have been so far disappointed in getting no Gymnadenia tridentata. But I still hope for it. I must have it, indeed.

Boott’s address is good, chiefly very good. But he speaks of Wyman’s paper without having duly considered it. Wyman’s experiments are better than Pasteur’s, and the results opposite!

P. S.—Papers just in, or rather telegrams, that you in London were daily awaiting and expecting the capture of Washington, etc., and speculating as to whether Jeff Davis’s envoys from Washington might not be received at London as a fait accompli. A good deal of little-concealed joy, etc.

Oh, foolish people! When will you see that there is only one end to all this, and that the North never dreams of any other,—the complete putting down of the rebellion. And since 1863 began, it was clear that it would be attended with the annihilation of slavery.

Time was when we should have highly valued English appreciation of the right cause. We have long ceased to care or think about it.

We only wish you had the city of New York. But the sympathizers with secession and riot there have done their worst, and lost their game. The city of New York is the only part of our country which I am ashamed of; and the trouble there is that it is not American.

Enough; good-bye.
A. G.

September 1.

Your fine, long letter of August 4th reached me up in the country, in my native region, in the centre of the State of New York, rusticating and enjoying ourselves mightily. We were among the people of a thriving region; a well-to-do set; no poverty near us for miles and miles, i. e., no hardship, except any that a drunken laborer might bring on his family; and I longed to take you out with us in our drives, that you might see a happy and comfortable country, more and more so every year, and perhaps a larger ratio of the population refined to a reasonable degree in feeling and life than I know of in any other part of the world.

I will consider about fantastic variation of pigeons. I see afar trouble enough ahead quoad design in nature, but have managed to keep off the chilliness by giving the knotty questions a rather wide berth. If I rather avoid, I cannot ignore the difficulties ahead. But if I adopt your view bodily, can you promise me any less difficulties?

If your Lythrum paper shall be at all equal in interest to that on Linum, it will be a gem.

As to tendrils, what are Hooker and Oliver (the latter a professor, too) about, and where have they lived not to know anything of them? Everybody must have seen, in Cucurbitaceæ and Passiflora, tendrils reaching out straight for a certain time, and then, if they reach nothing, coiling up from the end. Also the sweeping of stems....

P. S. [To the above?] Three numbers of Boston newspapers recently sent you, two by this mail (in which my good beau-père is again “spiking the English”), please to forward to Reuben Harvey, Esq., Limerick, Ireland.

You are quite out in supposing that hatred of England is increasing, or that there is the least desire to meddle with you, except in self-defense.

My own feelings were very sensitive at first, because I expected better things, and I then deferred much to British opinion. I now do neither, and nothing strikes me more than the smallness of mind and largeness of gullibility of the British people, as far as I can judge from their press (weeklies, quarterlies, and “Times”). But I do not suppose you will fight us because you dislike us; and so conversely. I suppose I do not see the papers which so abuse England, though I read influential and respectable papers; but from what I do see, I think we receive far more abuse and misrepresentation and unfair usage than we give.

As to the course of the war and policy of our country as to slavery, some day when you turn back to some early letter of mine you will see that I was a fairly good prophet; that the South might have delayed the abolition of slavery by giving up early in the conflict, but that every month of continued resistance hastened and insured the downfall of slavery. That is now doomed, and sure near to rapid death; quick in some places, slower in others, but sure.

Ill-usage of negroes—who make such good soldiers—will soon be unheard of, except with Irish. It will take some generations of American life to breed out the barbarian they bring to the country.

November 23.

The next best thing, of late, is the exposé of Lindsay and George Saunders (the Confederates) by Historicus.

I trust Historicus’ previous letters, in which he shows (about the same time my father-in-law’s articles on the subject reached England) that it is the duty of a country to see that armed or war vessels are not fitted out, quite irrespective of all municipal law, have produced their proper effect. Something has produced a great effect, and a great change in the idea of what it was incumbent on the government to do; and nothing can be more satisfactory than the views now taken; and the effect here is excellent. For we are sure that when the right notions once get a lodgment, as they have, England will faithfully carry them through. Lawyers whom I knew here were confident how the law would ultimately be laid down by your courts; but we greatly feared it would be done only after a few more such vessels had got to sea. All will go well now.

The newspaper I occasionally send you is a fair specimen of the influential part of the press here. Such articles as the “Times” likes to cite have far less effect here than you suppose in the determination of events.

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

Cambridge, December 11, 1863.

My dear Engelmann,—Our good old friend Von Martius writes me that on the 30th March next, he will reach his fiftieth anniversary of his doctorate. I dare say his friends will commemorate it in Germany. It occurs to me that it would be a good idea for some of us, his friends and correspondents, to compliment him upon the occasion. Suppose you draw up in German a letter of congratulation, etc., to be signed by yourself, Torrey, Sullivant, etc., and forward about the proper time. Send me, with your German circular letter to Martius, a translation in English....

Yes, I will let you work at botany when I guard you.[57] Your botanical work is far better than your politics. But you must swear the President’s oath, Proclamation and all!!

Martius is not a very remarkable botanist, but good; is a genial, philosophical soul (full of Plato, etc.), a good explorer, has worked up the Palms, etc., well, and is a wonderful man for the amount he knows on a vast number of different subjects,—philology, antiquities, philosophy, et id genus omne.

May 3, [1864].

... Spring is opening here, but late. From this to July 10, I am engaged in college every day in the week. Also am watching the herbarium building go up, the brick walls of which, if good weather, may be all up this week, and the roof put on next week.

Your circular letter to good Martius was very good, especially in its original German. Thanks....

Never mind if “Sagittaria graminea, Michaux,” is applicable to only one form. You had best keep the old name, the more so as that you propose, S. simplicifolia, is “not always correct.” We can’t let you change a name because you can improve it. Too many can and would play at that game, and less discreetly than you would, and then cite your example!

If Fendler gets tired of bush-clearing, and will come to me this fall, I will give him $500 a year as curator, lodgings, two rooms in gardener’s house, which I have reserved; and let him have say three days in the week for himself, if he wants them.

The people are determined to support and reëlect their excellent President Lincoln (what a noble letter that last of his), whether Frémont and the like make a coalition with copperheads or not. It is all the same to us. Lincoln will walk the course. God bless him!

Wright is coming home for a few months this summer.

TO CHARLES WRIGHT.

Cambridge, September 18, 1863.

What Don José affirms about coast and mountain vegetation being much the same is curious, unlikely, yet you seem to find it so. That bit of coast with all microphyllous and spiny vegetation is also curious.

I am glad you like him for being an abolitionist. Though not very much of an abolitionist myself, at the start, I hope I can fall in with, and welcome, the ways of Providence, when Providence takes the matter in hand, and say Amen....

Well, you are doing well in botanizing, and should finish up Cuban botany while you are at it. And on your return, you and Grisebach should join teams, and do up Cuban botany in a full memoir. You are right to stay till next spring. You are happy in Cuba; you would not be so here. Things in the United States do not go to suit you at all. “Things is working,” and in the right way,—but the end must be the total suppression of the rebellion,—the exile or punishment of rebel leaders, the return of the masses to their duty, and they will put things straight. Just what is now going on in Tennessee will go on elsewhere, I suppose. I know only one man in Cambridge that you could talk secesh to. We can correspond very well, and keep cool. But if we were together, during the war, we should get into a row at once. It could not be otherwise....

When the Union is restored (which it is to be, of course, when the rebellion is put down) those who do not love us well enough to resume their duties and privileges have only to take themselves off to some country they like better. The United States of America belongs to loyal Americans. After the war the country will prosper wonderfully. And the South will get to be something.

December 1.

Things move on.

“The mills of the Gods grind slow, but they grind exceeding fine.” Wait in Cuba a year longer, and you may return to a country in which slavery, having tried to get more, has lost all, and as a system is defunct, to the lasting benefit of all parties.

You might now revisit your old Texan haunts, under General Banks’s protection.

The November elections show a united North. Peace democracy has made its issue, and is dead. The reëlection of Lincoln by acclamation seems probable, supported by moderate men of all sorts, the extremes of the opposing parties alone going against him....

Merry Christmas to you.

January 21, 1864.

By the steamer of Saturday, which takes this, a good young fellow, Mr. Kennedy, a member of our Senior class, goes to Cuba, to look after business of his father, and, when he can, to botanize, only four or five weeks, that is, in vacation. He is very fond of botany, and bids fair to be a botanist some day, if he does not take to money-making instead....

This war, we think, will be pretty much over next summer; and then, back in the Union, with slavery pretty much nowhere, by the hearty wish of a majority of the people, we may expect a career of prosperity and real advance of the South, such as it has never known. At least we hope so.

TO R. W. CHURCH.

Cambridge, December 25, 1863.

For ourselves, your letter found us here just on the eve of our month’s holiday, a trip to Lake George, and thence to my natal region, in the most beautiful (and the most English-looking) part of the State of New York.... My wife was well enough to do her small part in a great fair held in Boston for the United States Sanitary Commission (which has kept the ladies very busy for the last six months), which has just closed, having brought the net proceeds of about $125,000 (it turns out $140,000) for the relief of suffering.

As to our national affairs, I should like now and then to send you such comments or articles as seem to me to throw most light upon our condition. There is little I could say in a letter. I said very early to English friends that if the rebellion were short it might leave things much as they were before (no desirable state), but if long and obstinate, it would cut the knot we were unable to untie and completely destroy the slave system. You see now it is coming to pass, by rather slow but sure steps, and a great blessing it is to be to the South. To the North the war, with all its sad evils, has been a great good, morally and politically. The end is in the hands of Providence, and we humbly wait for it; but there is very little diversity of opinion here as to what, essentially, the end is to be, that is, the complete territorial reinstatement of the Union, and the abolition of slavery. Very sanguine, you think, in England. We must wait and see, and on our part hope and labor.

Now for a little personal matter. I have long been anxious for the safety and final destination of my herbarium and other botanical collections, which in my house (besides that, there is not room for them) are too liable to destruction from fire. I had offered them, with my botanical library, to our university, if they would build in the Botanic Garden a fireproof building to hold them, and raise a small fund for their support. Recently and quite unexpectedly, a banker in Boston, almost unknown to me personally, has offered in any case to construct the building, and a few friends are taking steps, with good prospects, to raise by gifts a fund of $10,000 for the support of the establishment. When done, I shall feel that my collections, which are most important for North American botany, are secure for the use of future botanists. To secure this I gladly divest myself of the ownership of collections which have absorbed most of my small spare means for the last thirty years, and which are valued at $20,000 or more....

In the council of our American Academy (of which since May last I have been president) we have nominated Dean Milman to the foreign honorary membership vacated by the death of Whately, and Max Müller to that vacated by Grimm. The election has not yet taken place.

Mrs. Gray, with kind regards, joins me in best wishes for the new year to you and yours.

Very sincerely yours,
Asa Gray.

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

Cambridge, December 22, 1863.

My dear De Candolle,—I thank you cordially for your letter of the 13th November, and for the copy of Thury’s interesting and curious paper. This I had not seen, neither Pictet’s notice. I find it very interesting, but I do not see how he got a legitimate deduction from the facts given by Knight in the vegetable kingdom to his principle in the animal kingdom. However, that is of small moment if the principle holds. The subject is one which will naturally attract much attention, and which, as you remark, has philosophical bearings. I mean to bring it up, next week, for discussion at our private (social) scientific club in Cambridge.

I thank you also for the good spirit in which you take, as I meant them, my criticisms upon your article on Species, etc. There is no progress to be made upon such interesting subjects without free criticism, because without it we cannot perfectly clear up our own views nor impart them perfectly to others. And especially, since I have so often to criticise the views or writings of persons for whom I have no particular regard, it is pleasant, if only for the sake of impartiality, to criticise those for whom you have the greatest regard and respect. So I particularly like it when I can criticise such a near friend as J. D. Hooker or Bentham, and I believe they like it, too, at least Hooker, who is himself a very free critic. Of course, I know very well that you will be likely to turn all the points I made. The question upon which of the two foundations the idea of species rests, I well know is not to be settled off-hand by any bit of argument. Pray take up the cudgels against me whenever an occasion offers.

As to theoretical views, you and I receive and use them as means, not as ends, and expect to change many of them from time to time. Such especially as relate to origins and causes are the questions which we ask, rather than answers that we receive; and we put our questions variously according to the leadings of the case at the time. But this is all commonplace and trite.

It is curious to see that Owen, in his Aye-aye paper, has come to adopt Heer’s[58] views essentially, of course without the slightest allusion to Heer.

Our civil war goes on slowly, but very surely, toward the destruction of negro slavery; and with all its great cost, we may hope for future benefit in proportion. By the time we have nearly ended our war, it may be that Europe will have its turn again. I hope not.

A. Gray.

TO JAMES D. DANA.

Cambridge, January 20, [1864].

My dear Dana,—Perhaps you may not know, and I hope you may be as pleased as I was to know, that your article of last summer on Geological Periods is reprinted in full in the “Reader” (of London), with an appreciative prefix.

Cephalization goes on bravely in your very taking article which you have just sent me. I am much struck with it.

In one thing you zoölogists miss it, I think,—in following French customs in dropping the Latin, the vernacular of science, in names. I wish you would write Aphaniptera, etc., which is just as much English after all as Aphanipters, and good for all languages.

Have Englishified contractions for all such names if you will; it is well. But in proposing and formally writing of such divisions, etc., pray use the scientific form.

The other course has greatly jargonified zoölogy.

In botany we have always been more dignified. Moreover I detest “larve,” though Kirby tried to introduce the word. “Larva” has got to be as English as “phenomenon.”

But I dare say most would agree with you.

I like the ring of most of the new technical terms you have coined....

Ever yours,
A. Gray.

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

February 16, 1864.

My dear Darwin,—Here we are past midwinter, and not being stimulated as of old by your exciting letters, I have not written you a line since Christmas. Not that I have had anything in particular to tell you. I write now to say how very sorry I am that the word or two I get about you from Hooker gives me the idea that you are having an uncomfortable and suffering time, as well as entirely broken off from scientific work. I feel very sorry about it, and do long for better news of you....

I have lately printed a couple of monographs, one pretty big one, of American Astragali. I do not know that they contain anything you would care to see. Yet I think I shall send you a copy presently, through Hooker.

I feel much the loss of dear old Boott, so good, so true a friend, and he was always writing me little notes telling me of all that was going on.

The sentiment of our country, you must see, at least I assure you, has settled, as I knew it would if the rebellion was obstinate enough, into a determination to do away with slavery. Homely, honest, ungainly Lincoln is the representative man of the country.

A Boston gentleman, at cost of $11,000 or more, is to build a fireproof house for my herbarium, which I give to the university, with my botanical library. A fund of $12,000 is raising to support it, which will relieve me of the expenditure of about $500 a year. But I shall have double care and bother all the coming spring and summer.

Dr. Scudder has gone to Cuba, to attend an invalid, and wishes to examine orchid fertilization, and asks me what in particular he should look at.

Pray get well, dear Darwin, and believe me to be ever,

Yours cordially,
Asa Gray.

TO R. W. CHURCH.

Cambridge, April 4, 1864.

My dear Mr. Church,—If you have long ago written your American correspondent off your books, as being a right shabby fellow, he could not complain.

Here is your agreeable letter of January 19th, a most prompt and more than kind response to mine of Christmas, still unacknowledged by me!

The fact simply is that I have been delaying week by week in the hope of being able to announce to you that the subscription for the support of our botanical establishment was filled up. I am sorry to say that this cannot yet be said. The matter has been privately conducted, that is, nothing said about it in the public prints; but the two gentlemen who took the matter in hand have quietly circulated the paper among their well-to-do acquaintances in Boston, not beginning till late in January, under the idea that the fair for the Sanitary Commission had perhaps exhausted their friends’ purses. Since then, far greater and more pressing demands have been made upon the benevolent and the public-spirited, for a variety of good objects; and our affair has gone slowly in consequence.

I have not heard for a week respecting it, but a week ago the sum subscribed was a little less than seven thousand dollars, the greater part in sums of $500 each. The $10,000 is obviously secure, for subscribers of $100 each, yet to be appealed to, may be relied on for a good part of the lacking sum. But it begins to be clearly seen that $12,000 are needed for the capital of the fund, and this, at the present rate, it will take some time to secure.

Your own offer of a small subscription, I can truly say, not only gratified me in the highest degree, as an expression of an interest in our affair which I had no reason to expect, but has already been of use,—has really been as good for us as any contribution you ought to make. For I took the liberty to read that portion of your letter to three or four friends, and their interest in the matter was sensibly quickened and exalted by this evidence of the lively interest in the matter taken by a country parson, far away in England! So pray consider that you have already helped us on, and we are truly grateful to you for your generous proffer. There is, indeed, a strong temptation to accept your kind offer in the fact that, in the present state of exchanges, owing to our paper currency not on a specie basis (one of the sad consequences of our civil war), every pound sterling in England, in normal times worth only from $4.90 to $5.00, is worth nearly or quite $8.00, so that a contribution of £5 sterling really now counts here for about forty dollars!! So you see how hard it is for me to discourage your kind intentions. But I really feel that the sum which I specified, as the condition of my own gift to our university, is really quite sure, though slower in coming than we had hoped.

As to the building for the herbarium, I have only to state it goes on famously. It is considerably enlarged in plan from what was at first contemplated, and a favorable early spring has allowed of more progress than could have been expected at this season.

The generous donor of the building not only adopted at once the larger plans as soon as suggested, but himself proposed improvements and additions.

The building, the foundations of which are already laid, in the most substantial manner, is 32 by 57 feet, and is connected with my private study in the house I reside in by a neat conservatory 18 feet long, which takes the place of the simple wooden corridor at first intended. The whole will cost Mr. Thayer, the donor, by the contracts, more than $11,000, and is likely, by extras, to reach the round sum of $12,000. And all will be done before the summer is over, we trust.

See how the expression of your interest to me has led me on, to the neglect of everything else I want to write about.... I wish to say something about the troubles in your Old World, which, with all its age and wisdom, falls into “difficulties” hardly less grave than ours. I hope poor brave Denmark will not be crushed out of existence. There are English questions which we regard with much attention, ecclesiastical and social questions, on which I would fain know what you think. But I cannot write longer now.

Only as to our war, I beg you to believe that we (the earnest thoughtful people and most around us, according to their measure) have acted and are acting from the highest sense of duty,—duty to our beloved country and to humanity; and we keep the full conviction that great and permanent good is to result. Much of the good we see already, and more comes near to realization every day. So we work and trust, and suffer cheerfully. We only wish our views and motives were better appreciated in general in the country and by the people whose good opinion we most value. But even the lack of that appreciation, which is far from universal, is likely to do us good. I am always sure of your thoughtful good wishes for us. But I must break off.

Ever yours most sincerely,
Asa Gray.

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

Cambridge, May 30, 1864.

My dear De Candolle,—I have let your very kind letter of 28th January lie on my desk a long time, always expecting to write soon, but, having been extremely busy with various administrative matters and college work since it reached me, the convenient moment for writing to you has not arrived till now. I inclose a note to my young friend and late colleague, Professor Eliot, which I beg you to send to the poste restante on arrival. I learn from his friends here that he may be expected to be in Geneva about the time this reaches you.

In my note I ask him to call upon you, as a friend of mine. He will of course be unwilling to make any demands upon your time or attention. But I should like him to see you, and perhaps he might through you pay his respects to the savans in his line, notably to De la Rive. Having wife, etc., with him, and little time, his visit will be transient. Eliot is a chemist and physicist, a man of much promise, we think, and a most gentlemanly man. He is a very trusty friend of mine. He has passed the autumn and winter in Paris, studying hard, and will soon return here, bringing the latest news of you. He and his lady companions are just such people as we should like you to know America by.

I should say to you, moreover, that I gave to another colleague of mine, Professor Cooke, a note to you. He is a chemist and mineralogist, is full of research and zeal, a most estimable man.

You know, perhaps, that I have made over (or am to make over) all my herbarium and library to our university, in consideration of a fireproof building made to receive them, and a fund, of moderate extent, raised for the permanent support.... During the summer or early autumn, my collections will be transferred to this their permanent home, to my great relief.

It is probable that I shall continue to spend upon these collections all my available means, and I hope they will be of use in the future, as well as safe, which they are not in my wooden house. My own donation is reckoned in money value at about $20,000.

Charles Wright is expected home from Cuba soon, when there will be a new and interesting distribution of his phænogamous plants.

We trust that our civil war is in its last year, that is, if we are victorious, as we hope to be. In that case your American stocks will be all right again. Nearly all the little I possess is cheerfully put into United States government stocks, where I am well content it should be.

Small countries, which you prefer, would do very well if all were small, but the few large, like England and France, will domineer unpleasantly over the smaller. Just look now at poor Denmark, which has the misfortune to be small, and so is made to suffer! All Scandinavia had best combine, and build up a strong nation. Natural selection is hard upon the weak! However it may be in Europe, you must excuse us for endeavoring to prevent, while we may, even at great cost, the establishment of a European system on this side of the Atlantic; so we must not fail to put down the Confederacy. We shall, after that, in a quiet way, make the French emperor very uncomfortable in Mexico; but we hope that country may yet be a strong power, but not a French power.

Enough of politics! And believe me to be, with affectionate regard,

Ever yours,
Asa Gray.

Cambridge, January 30, 1865.

My dear De Candolle: ... This very day, I have received your envoi by post of the neat little article on leaves of Fagus, which I had seen in English dress, and the copy of Heer’s address. Many thanks to you. I have received also, and thank you much for it, the “Prodromus,” XIV., I. I have this evening read over Heer’s address. It is, as you say, capital. It interests me in its proof of the antiquity of the present flora; and I admit that he very neatly puts the case between his view of the production of our species out of the older ones, and that of Darwin. Here it still rests: Darwin has the great advantage of

DR. ASA GRAY IN HIS STUDY

being able to assign a vera causa. Heer has the disadvantage of having no known cause to assign; but he shows that things do not appear to have proceeded as Darwin’s theory requires. It does seem as if there were times of peculiar change as well as of great stability. But were this time of change and that of stability simultaneous for the species of a flora? And does Heer allow enough for the species which now occur under many forms,—show great polymorphism. I continually meet with these in the North American flora; in which the dying out of some forms, and their replacing by others, which may well take place in time, would, in effect, just give a change like that to be accounted for. But I cannot say that these varieties come in insensibly, very likely not.

Now, to speak of myself. My summer was much frittered away; the superintending of the new building for my herbarium just preventing any serious study. The autumn was devoted to the removal and rearrangement of plants and books, and to assisting Charles Wright in the collation and distribution into sets of his collections in Cuba for the last three years past; very full and interesting collections, and requiring much care and labor, on account of this distribution being a continuation of former distributions. I laid out into the sets every specimen with my own hands, Mr. Wright adding the tickets and numbers. It was an immense labor, and was finished only at the close of the last day of the year....

I mean to prepare for “Silliman’s Journal” a brief and simple notice of the edifice for my herbarium, so I will not speak further of it here; further than to say that I am well satisfied, only I sadly need a curator!

And now, I turn to your letter of September 29, and ask your pardon for having so long neglected it. Your letters, your reflections upon social and political, as well as upon scientific questions, are always very interesting and instructive to me. I regret that I can render so little return in kind....

As to our national troubles, the prospect brightens that we shall end the rebellion and slavery before long. God grant it.

Believe me to be, as ever, my dear De Candolle, very faithfully yours,