Chapter VII · TRAVEL IN EUROPE AND AMERICA. 1868-1880. (continued 2)

When I came here, in 1842, I was carrying on and publishing a most important original work, the “Flora of North America.” I have worked on it from time to time, but I never have been able to publish any more of it. And now what was done has all to be done again, and carried if possible to a completion; and there is no one else to do it if I do not. My educational books, or most of them, require to be re-edited; and I fail to find time and sufficient freedom of mind for the undertaking. If I could accomplish these tasks, or a good part of them, I am of opinion that I should in consequence be able (as is especially my desire) to do a great deal more for the university and the permanent interest of this establishment than I can expect now to do, as at present situated, even if it were possible or probable that I could so continue for any length of time. I am,

Very respectfully and truly yours, Asa Gray.

TO JOHN TORREY.

Cambridge, January 4, 1872.

Dear Doctor,—I have a horrid cold, which makes me unwell.

I write a brief line, in response to yours of yesterday, mainly to say that I fear I disagree with you about the reply to be made to Wilkes’s urgent request to print the manuscript of the Oregon collection of Wilkes’ Expedition.

It was prepared to print long ago; is not your fault that it has been delayed so long. The library committee have a right to print it, and might do so without your corrections if you decline to make any. We want the plates, which are now thrown away, and must be published. I would print in the form of a naked list,—except where remarks and descriptions are still wanted,—and to make all right and sure, and to relieve you, I, with Watson’s kind help, will fix it all up for you and read the proofs once, and so save you the worry. And I urgently request you to send this line to Professor Henry, as embodying my opinion, and my offer of help.

I am sure that if the rest of my manuscript is called for, I shall turn it over with satisfaction, though the same applies to it as to yours. And I should either alter accordingly or add notes.

The rest of your letter I will respond to in due time.

But I feel concerned to have those Oregon plates out.

I think I have some right to, as I paid for one hundred of them; but that is no matter. They are now neither published nor unpublished, which is a bad state of things.

Dr. Gray had the manuscript prepared some years before for the second volume of the “United States Exploring Expedition,” and notified the library committee that he was ready for publishing. Meantime came the war, and there was no money or thought for such things. When the country was again quiet and prosperous, the library committee who had formerly known and been interested in the work and its printing had passed away; there was no one to care for it, and the manuscript was never called for.

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

Cambridge, March 7, 1872.

Mr. Packard, one of our best entomologists, a most excellent and modest man, has asked to be introduced to you, that he may pay his respects.

I shy or refuse such applications generally, saying you can rarely see visitors or callers. But Packard is “fish to your net,” has his head crammed with facts bearing on derivation, is a disciple of the Hyatt-Cope school, that you may have heard of,—people who have got hold of what they call a law, though I do not see that they contribute any vera causa at all.

If you will turn the world of science upside down, you must expect that people will wish to see you....

May 31.

By the hand of an old correspondent of yours, and cousin of ours, Mr. Brace, I send you a little book, which may amuse you, in seeing your own science adapted to juvenile minds.[90] In some of those hours in which you can do no better than read, or hear read, “trashy novels,” you might try this instead. It will hardly rival “The Jumping Frog,” and the like specimens of American literature which you first made known to us....

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

Botanic Garden, June 10, 1872.

My dear De Candolle,—You must set me down as a faithless correspondent. Your pleasant letter of April 6, from Paris, has been long upon my table, and I think there is one of older date somewhere below. But all this spring I have been so overworked that I could respond only to the most necessary letters of business, duties of my professorship, of the Garden, and many other things. Well, my lectures are over, and for the ensuing year I may hope for some emendation. I give up the superintendence of the Botanic Garden, which has become a great burden, and I nominally devolve other university work in part upon an assistant, surrendering at the same time a part of my salary, hoping thereby to purchase time. We shall see if it be possible. But I have to begin with a new assistant, who will need training; but will then, I hope, take much off my hands. My youthful assistant of the past two years goes in a week or two to Europe, to study in some German university for a year or two; to Strasburg, I think, unless he first should go to Sweden, and there study Algæ, with Agardh, if he will receive him. He takes a fancy to lower Cryptogamia. His name is Farlow, an honest, good fellow. He will most likely be in Switzerland in the summer; and I shall give him a letter of introduction to you, whom he will wish to know. But take no trouble on his account, except to introduce him to Dr. Müller, from whom, as a working lichenologist, he could learn much.

Well, Mrs. Gray and I are going to set out, two weeks hence, for California. We both need the change, and are curious to see the country, having never seen even the Mississippi! The scientific meeting was to have been held there; but there is now a hitch about it. We go, however, at all events, and expect to pass a month in the Yosemite Valley, and elsewhere in the mountain region. I wish you were here to go with us. Hooker was counted on to go with us; but the very bad state of his mother’s (Lady Hooker) health, and the state of affairs at Kew prevent it....

I hope soon to receive your “Mélanges historiques,” which are sure to interest me. If I can I will write you a long letter from California, or Utah, or the Rocky Mountains!—more interesting than this scrawl from yours ever,

Asa Gray.

TO JAMES D. DANA.

June 22, 1872.

My dear Dana,—I fancy you have got hold of a good topic for your handling, and have a promising inquiry before you, in coördinating cephalization and natural selection as operative on the nervous system of animals. I expect you to get something interesting out of it.

But every now and then something you write makes me doubt if you quite get hold just right of Darwinian natural selection. What you still say about struggle not applicable to plants makes me think so.

Suppose the term be a personification, as, no doubt, strictly it is. One so fond as you are of personification and good general expressions ought not to object to what seems to me a happy term.

Speaking from general memory, I should say that the term, as used to express what we mean, was introduced by the elder De Candolle and applied in what I thought a happy way to the vegetable kingdom. I cannot drop it because you say there is no struggle where there is no will; perhaps you mean without consciousness, and then the field of struggle will be much limited. But call the action what you please,—competition (that is open to the same objection), collision, or what not,—it is just what I should think Darwin was driving at. Read “Origin” (4th ed.), pp. 72, 73, and so on, through the chapter, especially pp. 81-86.

This is enough to show you that when you speak of “Darwinian struggle” as occurring only “when the faculties of an animal are called into requisition,” you take too limited a view of what Darwin means.

For myself I should say that the faculties of the lowest animals and the faculties of plants were equally called into requisition in the case, in a manner so parallel that there is no drawing any but a purely arbitrary distinction between the one and the other.

I conceive one as effective as the other as regards the leading on and fixing variation.

When I say now again that the expression “fitted by its regional development to the region” conveys no clear meaning to me, I am only telling you, as I did before, my way of looking at things, not finding fault with yours.

By the way; “variation (inherent) in particular directions,” is your idea and mine, but is very anti-Darwin. Good-night.

A. Gray.

Dr. Gray greatly enjoyed his visit to California, with the long overland journey thither. It was an ever-renewed excitement to see plants growing which he had seen only as dried specimens, and the conductor of the train was at last almost in despair at the scattering of his passengers to grab what they could in the short halts, as they became inspired by seeing Dr. Gray rush as the engine slowed, to catch all within reach. Then when in motion again the specimens were brought from all sides to see what they were. And the preparing and drying went on to the wonder of some and the interest of all.

His ascent of Gray’s Peak was made a great occasion in the neighborhood. A large party gathered from Georgetown and Empire City, and started the afternoon before, after having been most hospitably dined by Judge McMurdy, in Georgetown; the night was passed in a mining-tavern cabin, and the ascent, some going on horseback, some on foot, was made the next morning. Speeches were made on the summit, and resolutions passed to confirm the names Gray’s and Torrey’s peaks given in 1862 by Dr. Parry, who was himself happily with the party. The ascent is not as difficult as in most mountains of that height, as one can ride on horseback to the top in August, when the snow lies only in patches; the trail is mostly over the rough shale, and for a month or two the summit, though over 14,000 feet, is almost bare. The view of the innumerable peaks is very magnificent.

At Dubuque he was the guest of an old Fairfield comrade. As the retiring president of the American Association he gave his address,[91] written mostly in the cars on the long overland journey, in which he explained still further some of his long-meditated conclusions on the distribution of the flora of Western North America.

TO R. W. CHURCH.

Cambridge, October, 1872.

My dear Church,—I promised to myself, if I did not to you, that I would write you from the other side of this continent; but writing and journeying are incompatible, at least in case where the time for the one is too short for your undertakings. But now we have been a month at home, and more; the accumulation of things to be seen to is worked off or nearly, and I mean now to tell you something of our summer’s doings.

As soon as we were free we set out.... At Chicago we had two nights and a day in which to see the desolated and fast rebuilding town. From this place, over a thousand miles west of Boston, we made our proper start.... A welcome rain cooled the air and laid the dust that morning, and not a drop more of rain did we see, any more than in Egypt, from that day onward, until, six or seven weeks later, we were back at the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains, when there was an evening thunderstorm, and the next morning I called Mrs. Gray to the window to see a novel sight,—the streets dripping and muddy! I wish I could describe to you our journey, and the sort of life we were leading. But if I go into particulars there will be no end.

At Omaha we were on the Pacific Railroad proper, and soon upon the plains, at first the larger part cultivated, but barer and drier as we advanced westward, and ascended imperceptibly; so that the next twenty-four hours brought us, with some fine views of the range, to the foot of the Rocky Mountains and a height of 5,000 or 6,000 feet above the sea; that afternoon over the Black Hills of the Platte, 2,000 or 3,000 feet higher, and the highest elevation of the road,—higher than the passes through the Rocky Mountains beyond,—and at nightfall we were traversing the wide grassy Laramie Plains, a vast, sequestered sub-alpine meadow. And when I rose early next morning, we were running through a dry desert “sage brush” (wormwood) region (desert, except for the botanist,—the first plant I saw and clutched proved to be Grayia), the scanty waters of which run into the Colorado of the West and the Gulf of California.

Another twenty-four hours, through grand scenery, brought us, after three nights in our car berths, to Ogden, on Salt Lake, where we took a branch road and, skirting the lake along the whole eastern shore, reached Salt Lake City, the Mormon town, before sunset. Here we passed two nights and a day, and enjoyed scenery worth crossing the ocean for, and saw something of the strange life of the district.

Back to Ogden; two more nights and days, one long day crossing the Humboldt desert, rendered passable only by the Humboldt River, which, though the ragged mountains all run north and south, yet runs from east to west and marks its course by a narrow line of greenness, and at dusk we saw its end in the Humboldt sink, a lagoon without outlet on the western verge of the basin, against the Sierra, the arid side of which we were ascending all night, to awake among pine forests at sunrise; to breakfast upon the very summit soon after; to descend through most striking scenery into the great valley of California, and, traversing that and the Contra Costa range, to see the head of the Bay of San Francisco at dusk; to cross the bay in a steam-ferry, and reach our hotel in San Francisco at ten P.M.,—a journey full of interest, not a bit monotonous or dull, from first to last. There were fatigues and small discomforts, of course, but these are all forgotten long ago, and the whole transit dwells in memory as one continual and delightful piece of pleasant, novel, ever-varied, and instructive sight-seeing. Of course the identifying at sight, as we flew by, of flowers new to me in the living state, and the snatching at halts, and the physical features of districts which I had always been interested in, and knew much about but had never seen, all gave me occupation and continual pleasure. But it was much the same with all the party. Even the return journey was hardly less interesting....

From Dubuque we took steamer up the Mississippi River, through its finest scenery up to St. Paul, Minnesota; saw the falls of St. Anthony and Minnehaha; thence, while the rest of our party essayed Lake Superior, Mrs. Gray and I returned home by rapid stages.

I have only to-day finished the study and laying into the herbarium of specimens I gathered and dried, regretting the while that I did not collect more specimens and many other species, as I might have done.

Tyndall is in Boston, and I trust will be with us next week. I have not yet seen him, nor Froude, nor even MacDonald, the third lecturing notability in Boston.

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

Cambridge, October 6, 1872.

You delight me by your promise to take up Dionæa and Drosera now, and I imagine you as now about it. Good! And I am so glad you will take that opportunity to collect your botanical and quasi-botanical papers. These, with the Dionæa, etc., will make a nice and most welcome volume.

In answer to your query, I think I can “support the idea,” or the probability of it, “that tendrils become spiral after clasping an object from the stimulus from contact running down them.” For though some “tendrils do become spiral when they have clasped nothing,” others do not. The adjustment of the unstable equilibrium is more delicate in the former, so that it starts under some inappreciable cause or stimulus. That the stimulus may be so propagated downward is clear in the sensitive plant, where the closing of the leaflets in succession will follow the closing of the ultimate pair under slight and local irritation. And in the tendril the coiling below is just a continuation of the same movement or same change as that which incurved the tip in clasping, that is, a relative shortening of concave or lengthening of the convex side of the tendril. Would you not infer that the action was propagated downward?

So you were astonished at Mrs. Gray’s audacity. Well, “toujours l’audace;” she is all the better for it. Some horseback work in getting to and into the Yosemite Valley was severe, but she bore it so well that I ventured, when we made our detour into the Colorado Rocky Mountains, to take her up to the summit of Gray’s Peak, 14,300 feet, or thereabouts, where she acquitted herself nobly. The day was perfect, the success complete, and the memory of it one of the most delightful of the many pleasant memories of the whole journey. Our great trip was the round from San Francisco to Mariposa Grove, Yosemite Valley, entering over Glacier Point, from which (tell your sons) is a new trail down the 4,000 feet into the valley; made excursions from the valley during several days, and returned by a long sweep through the little Tuolumne grove, round foothills to Murphy’s and the Calaveras Grove, and so back to San Francisco. Afterwards Mrs. Gray and I went to Santa Cruz and up the San Lorenzo Valley among noble redwoods, rivaling the Sequoia gigantea. On return we made one stretch to the east base of the Rocky Mountains, then down to Denver, and up into the mountains, to 8,400 feet, where we had a pleasant week or more (just the climate to give strength to an invalid), whence I climbed a high mountain or two, among them Gray’s Peak, the highest, as already mentioned. Thence we came down to Dubuque and hot weather, on the Mississippi to St. Paul and St. Anthony, etc., and then home by rail, having been twelve busy weeks away.

Well, we are longing to do it again, and more! But I am settling down to my work as well as I may, well content with the summer’s holiday.

December 2, 1872.

Well, it is wonderful, your finding the nervous system of Dionæa!!! Pray take your time next spring, and do up both Drosera and Dionæa. I will endeavor next spring to get hold of Drosera filiformis and make the observations. I will also do better, by sending your note on to Mr. Canby, who lives near its habitat, and has done something already in such observations.

As to coiling of tendril. I think your idea is that in the coiling of a fixed tendril, one coil has its concave side the opposite of the part that has coiled the other way.

Now take a piece of tape say a span long; black one side, let some one hold the two ends while you twist in the middle. The two halves are coiled in opposite directions, just as a tendril which has caught does. The same color will be on the outside of the coil all the length.

Blacken with a stroke of paint a line along the whole length of a caught tendril. On straightening it out the black will be all on one side.

I have not had time to follow it up, and need not, since you are sure to do it. But I think it clear that one and the same side is concave, that is, the relatively shortened side, the whole length of the caught tendril. Do not you?

Mrs. Gray is absent while I write, or she would add her best regards and best wishes to my own for a happy New Year to you all.

TO C. W. ELIOT.

Botanic Garden, Cambridge, January 1, 1873.

My dear President Eliot,—Will you kindly present the inclosed communication to the corporation at its next meeting.

I need not say to you that I could not take so serious a step as this without much consideration, and that I would not do it if I were not confident that the department which I have served in the university for almost thirty-one years need not now suffer by my withdrawal. I am warned also by growing experience of the fact that the needful work which I could formerly do with ease can now be done only by effort, followed by exhaustion and other unpleasant effects, which may be expected to increase; and it is clear that I have left to me, at best, barely time enough, when rigorously economized, to complete the works for which I have long been pledged, and without the accomplishment of which my life will have been largely a failure. The corporation will perceive that I do not intend to be idle, but to concentrate what energies remain to me upon the kind of work for which I am best—and indeed peculiarly—fitted, both by disposition and by more than forty years of preparation. As this work proceeds, the herbarium of the university, always requiring attention during its continued increase, will be put into the condition in which I should leave it, with its value greatly enhanced. In view of this, and of the fact that the herbarium forms an important part of the apparatus of instruction here, I trust the corporation will think it reasonable to allow me the possession of the house I live in, in recompense of my services as curator of the herbarium.

I offer my resignation unconditionally, that the corporation may have, as it should, the whole matter in its hands without embarrassment. If it be desired to keep my name for the present upon the catalogue, and especially if the corporation should prefer not to place a permanent incumbent just yet in the Fisher professorship, I would in that case take the liberty to suggest that the present very capable and efficient assistant, Dr. Goodale, be made adjunct professor of vegetable physiology, with salary assigned from the Fisher professorship. I remain, dear Mr. President,

Very sincerely yours, Asa Gray.

Messrs. the President and Fellows of Harvard College:

Honorable and dear Sirs,—The time has arrived when I may, as I think without detriment to the university, retire from the professorship to which I was appointed in the spring of 1842; and I hereby tender my resignation of it, to take effect at the close of the present academic year, when I shall have completed thirty-one years of service.

I trust that I may still be useful to the university; and if agreeable to the corporation I should like to continue to be Curator of the Herbarium. With sincere regard, I am your obedient servant,

Asa Gray.

Botanic Garden, Cambridge, January 1, 1873.

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

Cambridge, January 14, 1873.

My dear de Candolle,—I am much and long in your debt,—all the more by your agreeable letter of the 16th ult....

Let me note points in your letter. Your volume of “Mélanges,” etc., has not yet come to hand,—but it is sure to come in time through the Smithsonian Institution, and will be received with welcome. I will see to the reproduction of the article on the Dominant Language of the Twentieth Century,—English of course. I am glad you will make a full index of the “Prodromus” quoad Genera. I wish it had been species, also!

Glaciers in California! Why, there is a fair remnant of one now, on the north side of Shasta,—and more in the southern part of the Sierra; and as to glacial marks, the geologists note them abundantly.

I am glad you saw much of Mr. Adams at Vallon. Madame A. is the more of a talker, is she not? Or, perhaps she does not speak French. Adams is vice-president of our American Academy; and is, I hope, presiding this evening at a meeting which I myself am not well enough to attend. I hope he will become president, for I mean to retire in May....

Dr. Parry passed last summer in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, where Madame and I visited him, in his cabin; and we ascended Gray’s Peak together (14,400 feet). Torrey, old as he is, was there later, but did not get up the twin Torrey’s Peak, though his daughter did surmount Gray’s Peak....

Now about myself. In what time I can save I am assisting Brewer in the “Flora of California,” and shall do for him the Monopetalæ, and finish next summer, if my health does not fail.

Moreover, this is my last year of university work. I finish in July, and then resign, and give my remaining time to the “Flora of North America.” Although it is so arranged, it is not yet to be announced. It is difficult to drop at once the many things I have charge of, and the vast correspondence all over the country, which has been very useful to me, and others, but which takes a deal of time. But I am making a fairly good beginning. Mrs. Gray delights with me in the prospect of release from many a care, and of devoting myself without distraction to the work I have always liked best.

I really hope it is not too late to do something (a few lines from you upon this subject might, entre nous, be useful to me).

TO ——.

Cambridge, May 18, 1873.

... I cannot object to your maintaining the hypothesis that each and every existing plant and animal form has been directly created (or mediately created, if you see a difference) out of the soil, pure hypothesis though it be, and one which “from the nature of the case can never be directly proved.” It is natural that you should hold to such hypothesis as long as you believe it to be possibly tenable.

But what I may ask you very seriously to consider is, whether you are prepared to bear the responsibility you assume in maintaining and teaching that no hypothesis of the derivation of existing “specific” forms from previous ones more or less like them can logically be theistic and religious. How far any such hypothesis may be probable or tenable in view of the evidence is not the question raised, but a far more momentous one.

Consider what the “younger men who learn of you” will be likely to think when they come to discard, as the best informed ones probably will after a while, your scientific views on this subject; but still, perchance, confide in your dictum that the doctrine of the derivative origin of one species from another cannot logically stop short of “blank materialism, destructive both of science and religion, and even ... to morals and social organization.”

There will be “a heavy penalty to pay,” but there are two sides to the question as to who is to pay a part of it. What I said in the last paragraph of the Dubuque address “we need not here consider”[92] is, nevertheless, worthy of consideration.

The time is not very distant, I imagine, when those who have protested against such reckless statements will be thought to have done some service to religion as well as to science.

I trust that the foundations of theism and of the Christian religion rest upon firmer foundations than the so-called “immutability of species.”

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

Cambridge, June 12, 1873.

My dear de Candolle,—I must be in your eyes a disgracefully negligent correspondent and an ungrateful friend. I think, however, that I must have acknowledged the arrival of your volume which I received, I think, in March,—more likely late in February. The attempt at a perusal of it was when, on the 12th March, I went on to New York to pay the last duties to my venerable and good friend and associate, Dr. Torrey. I read a good part of the volume on the railway journeys, and planned a review of several of the articles. Then, a month later, I broke away from my laborious life here, and made a visit to my old friend Professor Henry, at Washington. I even went as much farther south, to Wilmington, North Carolina, where I met the spring in all its beauty, a month in advance of our tardy north. I collected a lot of live Dionæas, etc. I returned to a great accession of university work, my assistant being obliged to leave me on the 1st of May.

To return to your volume: I called Professor Henry’s attention to it, as one which would all through interest him much, if ever he finds time to read it. He will translate the article on the Language of the Twentieth Century for his Report, and perhaps others.

At a time when I was already overloaded, the death of dear Torrey has thrown some cares and extra work upon me. I have to carry through the press a report of his upon the plants collected in west North America, in Wilkes’s Expedition, which was drawn up, but never really finished, twelve years ago, and was called for just during Torrey’s last sickness, and to his annoyance, which I felt bound to relieve as well as I could.

Then, six weeks or more ago, died my next oldest friend and companion, Sullivant, making a sad spring and giving me a needed warning to make haste. He again leaves two unfinished works which I must see to, though Lesquereux will, I trust, edit them. Of one, indeed, he was to be joint author. The other, a second volume of the beautiful “Icones Muscorum,” is ready as to the plates, but not at all so, I learn, for the letterpress.

For myself, as I think I have already told you, this summer completing thirty-one years of professorial work in the university, I am relieved from further duties of instruction,—and of my salary. I shall not experience the full relief until the very close of summer. For, in the interest of this department of the university, and to leave it in proper working condition, I have undertaken a course of what we call university lectures,—meaning lectures intended the rather for others than members of the university,—and have opened the botanical laboratory to pupils, mainly teachers in schools, for the summer.[93] Considerable time must be given to them, but, after a few weeks, I hope to throw it mainly upon my assistant, Professor Goodale.

Professor Goodale, under appointment as assistant professor of vegetable physiology, will take the whole work of instruction in botany off my hands; but if a former assistant and pupil, Dr. Farlow, now with De Bary, proves capable of it, as I hope, he will, I trust, take up the work in systematic botany. His fancy, however, is for Cryptogamia.

Mr. Sereno Watson is the only one here to do work in systematic botany, but he will not teach. He and I are endeavoring to help out Professor Brewer in the “Flora of California,” which, to be done at all, must be pushed through at once. I have promised to do the Gamopetalæ, which come in the field I am striving to cover for the “Flora of North America.” That work I hope now to give myself to.

I ought to have taken this step several years ago; but I could not afford it, and it is only now that I have been able to bring the department here into the position in which I feel justified in resigning the care of it. I retain the charge of the herbarium, and I continue my residence in the house which is connected with it.

Dr. Torrey’s herbarium and library were made over to Columbia College, and will be kept up, although no professor will be appointed at present.

Mr. Sullivant’s bryological collections and library are to come here.

I send you by mail a copy of my biographical notices of Torrey and Sullivant; both from “American Academy Council Report of Proceedings,” and both printed in advance, in “Silliman’s Journal,” where you will see them.

By the way, I have resigned the chair of the American Academy, after ten years’ occupation, and it is taken by Mr. Adams, whom you know. The third class (classical and historical) takes its turn.

TO W. M. CANBY.

Cambridge, June 30, 1873.

My dear Canby,—My Dionæas grow finely, and are the delight of my heart.

Drosera longifolia, also cultivated, is almost as good a fly-catcher.

Now and then I see a little exudation inside base of hood of Sarracenia flava, which answers to what my Southern correspondent pointed out; but is not very marked....

Cambridge, July 7.

... I have also seen here that water is secreted in the pitcher of Sarr. flava before the lid is open.

But I have also seen some time ago, when the weather got rather warm, very minute globules like finest dew on the erect part of the lid, near base, inside. And, lately, during the very warm days, I found in some this increased, and the droplets running together into a clammy exudation. But I want to see more of it. I shall watch, as I get a chance, and the weather gets hot. Look at yours. See if there is anything of the sort in S. purpurea; I think not.

I have not the book yet. But I somehow understand that this exudation on the lid is mentioned in the English translation of Le Maout and Decaisne’s “General Treatise of Botany!” The French has it not. Very likely it has been found out by Darwin, who finds out everything!

... Conundrum? Why does the Dionæa trap close only part way, so as to cross the bristles of edge only, at first, and afterwards close fully?

Darwin has hit it. I wonder you or I never thought of it.

A. G.

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

Cambridge, October 27, 1873.

My dear De Candolle,—If I were a better correspondent, I should have long ago thanked you for your interesting and welcome letter of August 11, from Samaden. I was in the Engadine when last in Switzerland, and got near the top of Piz Langarde, when a storm drove me back.

Your announcement leads me to expect soon the new (and alas, last!) volume of the “Prodromus.” Well, it must give you a huge sense of relief to have it off your hands; something like the relief I now feel at the termination, at the close of thirty-one years, of my professorial duties, upon which you felicitate me. On account of a summer course of instruction, which I felt bound to initiate for my successor, I did not really close my labors until the end of July. Since then I have been able to work at systematic botany very steadily. We took, my wife and I, a holiday of a fortnight, in which we visited friends on the Hudson River and its tributaries, at the close of September, just as the foliage was beginning to display the bright autumnal tints, which this year have been unusually gorgeous, and have not yet disappeared, although the leaves are now falling fast. The sight is most enjoyable to me in the earlier autumn, when the verdure still prevails and makes a setting for the red, yellow, and russet.

I am now deep in the Compositæ for the “California Flora” of my friend Brewer, and so am trying Bentham’s work. It generally holds good,—wonderfully so, considering its extent, and the comparatively short time he took for it.

Your agreeable volume of “Miscellanies” is now in the hands of your old friend and my neighbor, Jules Marcou; who asked to borrow it, having been unable to purchase a copy. It is reported out of print. I think I sent you a light article I wrote for the “Nation” last summer,—I believe in June,—in which I gave an abstract of your essay on the Dominant Language of the Twentieth Century. It has attracted considerable attention. I see that those who have studied the subject think that the increase of population in North America is not to go on at the rate it has been going; that the check is already apparent.

A week or two ago appeared in the “Nation” an article (sent to you last week by post), in which I had occasion to notice some other parts of your volume, at considerable length. I have also been tempted to give some account of your essay on Natural Selection as applied to man; but I find it would take me too much out of my own line, and absorb time which I cannot spare. Indeed, I have only looked over that essay, and am not qualified to abstract, still less to criticise it. The longest article of the volume, which gives the title, I have not given as much attention to as I ought, probably, or I should perhaps value it more highly. But it seems to me that membership in scientific academies—the three you take not excepted—is so largely affected by circumstance, irrespective of talent and of the value of work done, that one cannot very confidently base general conclusions upon the data. Yet I have no great confidence in my opinion. Anyway, the article is full of interesting matters....

What do you and Dr. Müller say to Bornet’s memoir, on the nature of lichens? His exposition is so clear that, if he is an honest and good investigator,—as I cannot well doubt,—his conclusions carry conviction.

My sheet fills, and leaves now barely room for Mrs. Gray’s messages of kindest remembrances to yourself and to Madame De Candolle, in which I beg to join. Long may you flourish, and much good work yet do. For one thing, pray print the list of botanical names!

Ever yours, A. Gray.

November 26.

... I am going this morning to witness the nuptials of my colleague and friend Professor Sargent and a charming young lady of Boston; and, on the chance of their having a day in Geneva, I wish to introduce the happy couple to you and Madame De Candolle. They will tell you much of me, and of the satisfying and I trust useful sort of life I an now leading. Some evidence of renewed botanical activity in the form of a couple of botanical papers just issued here, too bulky to send well by post, I will cause to reach you by way of Paris.

Professor Sargent is given to horticulture and arboriculture. He not only takes charge of the university Botanic Garden, but also of a recent and noble foundation for an arboretum, from which much may in due time be expected.

It is most pleasant and hopeful when, as in the present instance, a young man of means and best social position chooses to devote his time and energies to practical scientific ends, rather than to business or pleasure. You are more accustomed to that at Geneva than we are here in America.

I know that, before this can reach you, I shall have occasion to write to you, and to announce the reception of the last volume of the “Prodromus,” now on the way to me. So I have only to add that I am always

Very sincerely yours, Asa Gray.

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

May 12, 1874.

... I sent to Hooker to forward to you two articles in the “Nation,” on Insectivorous Plants, written to reclaim your work from Bennett, who began to appropriate it, etc., etc.

It is already leading to discovery. A physician in Carolina, a good observer, already writes me that in S. variolaris, the best of Sarracenias, he thinks he finds the watery liquid anæsthetic (??) and the sweet secretion not. But he says there is a line of sweet, a trail, running from the sweet rim down the edge of the wing outside nearly to the ground, which lures up ants (with which Wyman tells me the pitchers are crowded), just like the train of Indian corn which hunters scatter along the ground to lure wild turkeys into the trap! Does not that beat all!

Also my articles here resulted in the discovery related in the paper inclosed. The take-off of Thomson’s germs from another planet is good.

June 16.

... The gratification I feel in learning (by yours of the 3d) that you are pleased must, I am sure, exceed any satisfaction of yours in regard to my subdued and quiet article in “Nature.”[94] Lockyer, to my great surprise, applied to me for it, and of course I could not refuse. I think it will generally be regarded by scientific people as just and moderate.

Odd that you should not have recognized my hand from the first in the “Insectivorous Plants,” written, in fact, to vindicate your rights. The papers called forth a second hoax, as elaborate as the first, and much better done. I have no idea who wrote them.

You must, meanwhile, have received the article in the “Nation,” reviewing Dr. Hodge’s “What is Darwinism?” You see what uphill work I have in making a theist of you, “of good and respectable standing.”

Do hurry up the book about Drosera, etc. My plants of Sarracenia variolaris, having lost their spring growth in transmission, have not yet made any that is satisfactory. So I begged Dr. Mellichamp, who had sent me leaves with gorge sanded over at the sweet-secretion part, to send some for the trail. He wrote me it was too late in the season; they were all drying up. But this morning, with the inclosed postal card, came several with the sand sticking fairly well to the glutinous line, and I send you one of them. I wish I could send you Mellichamp’s long letters, about the two sorts of larvæ, that appropriate, one the upper, one the lower part of the pitcher.

My wife (who sends her love to you and yours) is much amused by your backgammon reminiscence. For the year past we have a way of getting on most peacefully. I sit by her side and play solitaire with two packs of cards, she looks on and helps, and when we don’t succeed there is nobody to “flare up” against but luck.

Ever yours, A. Gray.

P. S.—I think I never sent you my felicitations upon your election as Foreign Honorary Member of American Academy Arts and Sciences.

We are proud to number you among the seventy-five (too many). And, I may tell you, only two negative votes were cast, one by an Academician who made a speech on the occasion, to which nobody vouchsafed a word of reply.

A. G.

Cambridge, June 19, 1874.

My dear Darwin,—Your second letter reached me last evening, and this morning came from the publishers some copies of the number of “Nature.” You seem as pleased and are as ingenuous as a maiden when she first finds out that she has an admirer!

Now I am a little vexed, as I am apt to be when I let anything be printed without reading the proof myself. Some one has doctored one sentence, and made it say the contrary to what I wrote, and to what is true; I make the reclamation on a separate sheet: and also another, which may be typographical, but which I am confident I could not have written; I surely wrote “to many,” not “in many.”

My claim for you about teleology I have made several times, in “Silliman’s Journal,”[95] and elsewhere. It is a matter on which I have a good deal insisted.

Yours affectionately, Asa Gray.

P. S.—My point (which is blunted) was to show how very near Brown came to “hitting the nail on the head” without hitting it, striking wild instead!

A. G.

TO W. M. CANBY.

July 6, 1874.

I am glad if you have Darlingtonia in a state to examine. I have some young leaves growing, which show nothing yet. Mellichamp will send me a paper, which I will read at Hartford next month. Won’t you post up Darlingtonia also—getting what you can from Lemmon. He has not written to me about it. My young fish-tails show no exudation yet; and they are colored like the rest of the leaf.

Ever yours, A. Gray.

Botanic Garden, July 8, 1874.

Dear Canby,—Yours of 7th instant received. I thought you had live Darlingtonia. Of ours the old plant has died after starting three new offsets. But the growing leaves are small. If it goes on I may do something. Thus far I have detected no water in the tubes, nor any sticky secretion. But I shall slit one soon. Make notes for Hartford.

You have not guessed the conundrum, though you have made a step in distinguishing the two different movements. I’ll tell you. It is to strain out the small flies. Do you take? Or want details? I send you Darwin’s late letters,—one came this evening. We have lost all those Pinguiculas.

Can we get any from Wilmington now? Are there any near Dr. Mellichamp? You may forward Darwin’s last letter to him and set him to observing,—collecting and preserving leaves with insects stuck fast, and margin turned over. See if ours turn over the edge!

How does D. find out they digest?

July 14.

When Dionæa is irritated by a small fly, he has plenty of time to escape through the meshes, and the leaf soon opens, ready for better luck next time. Think what a waste if the leaf had to go through all the process of secretion, etc., taking so much time, all for a little gnat. It would not pay. Yet it would have to do it except for this arrangement to let the little flies escape. But when a bigger one is caught he is sure for a good dinner.

That is real Darwin. I just wonder you and never thought of it. But he did.

Pretty good,—the solar protector! So Fendler is near you. Remember me to the good fellow.

I wish he had let Cosmical Science alone! But now he never will, and is a gone goose.

Ever yours, A. Gray.

Dr. Gray, being sent away for a cough, made a journey to Apalachicola, Florida, going by Washington, Augusta and Tallahassee, of which and his successful search for Torreya he wrote a lively account for the “American Agriculturist,” republished in his “Scientific Papers,” selected by C. S. Sargent.

He was especially interested in seeing Torreya, a fine tree named for his friend Dr. Torrey, which is only known in one or two localities in Florida, on the banks of the Apalachicola River; and with some trouble he found it growing, and had the satisfaction of hoping that it was valued enough to be preserved. There is a second Torreya growing in Japan, a third Torreya in California, and a fourth in China. “But,” as Dr. Gray says, “any species of very restricted range may be said to hold its existence by a precarious tenure. The known range of this species is not more than a dozen miles in length along these bluffs, although Dr. Chapman has heard of its growing farther south, where the bluff trends away from the river.”

He went to Stone Mountain in Georgia, a curiously bare, immense mass of stone, one side too steep to climb, but having in clefts some rare plants growing. From Chattanooga he made an excursion up Lookout Mountain, interesting from its reminiscences of “Sherman’s March,” and also the habitat of some rare plants he was so fortunate as to find.

TO WILLIAM M. CANBY.

Botanic Garden, March 13, 1875.

My dear Canby,—I do not get on, and shall not in this melting snow and bad season.

I yield to advice, and Mrs. Gray and I are going South,—I do not know where, but somewhere, taking my vacation now instead of in summer. I want to find now—and reach comfortably—what we have here at the first of June.

You know somewhat of the South; I think I should like best to get to Apalachicola and St. John’s River and see Torreya. But it seems far off.

I want to recruit, and to be good for something, which at present I am not!

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, April 25, 1875.

My dear Canby,—Well, we have got back again, so far; and here, I think, we shall stick for a few days. Had we anticipated so much cold and backwardness, we should have stayed south longer.

Apalachicola was heavenly. But at Macon, coming north, we struck the cold wave; came on by Atlanta (Stone Mountain), Chattanooga (roots of Silene rotundifolia), and thence via Lynchburg straight here. I found Torreya, and had a good time with it. Lots of detail to tell you....

I am lazy in traveling, or I would have written you. Then I have been pretty busy, too, and have done several hard days’ work, causing much but healthy fatigue.

Cambridge, May 8.

We are at home, with delightful memories of you and yours.

I think I hinted to you that I found two Crassulaceæ on Stone Mountain, both annual.

One, most abundant on the lower slopes, is glaucous-green, and has bright white flowers. The pods show it to be a true Sedum. I send a small specimen. Note the blunt pods and short style. This—as shown by a bit of fruit in my herbarium—is Sedum pusillum, Michx.!

The other is dull purple in general hue, smaller, grows only well up the mountain, abounds in a small form on the very top, and is rather later; but I make out the dehiscence, and it is Diamorpha pusilla, Nutt.!

The specimens you sent to me are this, larger and later than any I got. But, as you directed me to the base of the mountain for Diamorpha, you must have got this too. Your specimens have full-grown fruit. Look at them and see if the larger ones have not the regular dehiscence down the side of Sedum, and let me know.

May 12, 1875.

Thanks for your letter and the Sedum.

Now for another find. The moment I set eyes on the Arenaria of Stone Mountain, I said, Ho! here is A. brevifolia, Nuttall, of which I had only a single stalk in herbarium. Comparing now, I was right, and Nuttall says his specimen is from Tatnall County (which is strange, that being in southeast Georgia). The question remains, Is it only a low-country form of Arenaria glabra?

Your specimen—with fruit—and M. A. Curtis’s[96] from the mountains of Carolina, being in the same state, compare pretty well. I should unite them, only the seeds are different, Stone Mountain plant half the size, and shape rather different. But please rattle me out some real ripe seeds of your plant, for further comparison.

At Stone Mountain I looked rather for small specimens to match with A. brevifolia. I send you a bit.

I have sent the Sedum and Diamorpha yesterday to Paris, to compare and see if both are in Herbarium Michaux.

I am proud of my little discovery!

Ever yours, Asa Gray.

TO R. W. CHURCH.

Cambridge, June 22, 1875.

I must indulge, on its rising, the impulse to communicate with you, which a letter from Miss P. to my wife, just received, has awakened.

If I go on as I have been going, we shall come to know nothing of each other....

She will have told you of our loss in the death of Mrs. Loring. I never knew a woman fuller of charity, humility, and good works.

If there were time for a gossiping letter I or Mrs. Gray would give you some account of a trip which we made to Florida this spring. An annoying cough, and a chronic catarrh,—the consequence of a trying winter, acting upon old susceptibilities,—distressed my friends more than it did me. So, yielding to their solicitations, off we went, about the middle of March, to Washington, visiting old friends; to Augusta and Savannah, Georgia; and thence Apalachicola, a now almost deserted, but once flourishing town, on the Gulf of Mexico. We met the spring in Georgia; in Florida we were in early summer, about like our own middle June.

The botanizing was delicious, very many nice things which I had never seen growing before; our quarters comfortable, and the fare exceptionally excellent. East Florida, which has large hotels, was full of invalids and pleasure travelers, making a crowd not to our liking. I had special botanical objects leading me to west Florida, an out-of-the-world region, where we had everything to ourselves. We were late for the oranges, gleaning the last half dozen from the trees of our friends. My throat is so sensitive that I dare say we shall need to go again next March, and earlier than before. So, if you will arrange to join us, I can promise you a pleasant time, and a real rest.

October 11, 1875.

What a capital article it is which your friend Lord Blachford has published in the “Contemporary” for September, on Huxley’s Automata hypothesis!

It is long since I have read anything which pleased me more.

Do you know who is P. C. W., in Article 6, of the same number? He makes one suggestion of some value, that I some day want to follow up.

I am grinding away at my work in the usual manner. We are just in the glory of the glowing autumnal foliage, and making ready for winter. If health holds out, here we expect to remain, at least till spring....

TO G. FREDERICK WRIGHT.[97]

Botanic Garden, July 1, 1875.

Dear Mr. Wright,—Thanks for your letter. It may be that the time has come in which a collection of my popular articles on Darwinism, etc., would be useful.[98] Your thinking so would go far to make me believe it. But then, you are one of the moderate number of people who have carefully read them, and one of the few who well understand and appreciate them,—because you have given the subject an attentive consideration,—and who are awake to the harm that comes from theologians and ministers denouncing a view that scientific men are more and more receiving as probably true. I should like to know how Professor Park regards the proposition.

I will say that while I am not unwilling to collect them for reprinting, in case they are called for, it would not quite do for me, in the position I occupy (I mean as a man of science), to republish them in a collected form, without entering anew and further into some of the pending questions; to do which would seriously interrupt the legitimate work which I have in hand, and to which I am deeply pledged. I suppose I could add, and should be disposed to add, a note or two,—especially one upon teleology from a Darwinian point of view,—a subject upon which there is something still to be said, though I do not see the way to say it conclusively. You will probably do it better than I ever can.

At present, I think I should let them alone, unless there comes what you ministers recognize as a call for them, and such a call I should defer to.

If such as Professor Park and yourself were to ask it, I would see if a publisher could be got to take them up. But you don’t know how I dislike to have my name bruited about.

Dr. Peabody was very glad of the relief you gave him on Sunday week, and like myself was greatly pleased with your thoughtful discourse.

August 14, 1875.

... The important thing to do, is to develop aright evolutionary teleology, and to present the argument for design from these exquisite adaptations in such a way as to make it tell on both sides; with Christian men, that they may be satisfied with, and perchance may learn to admire, Divine works effected step by step, if need be, in a system of nature; and the antitheistic people, to show that without the implication of a superintending wisdom nothing is made out, and nothing credible.

Now for a month or two, I am pressed by daily technical work to the extreme, and get no chance to turn these matters over in my mind.

I don’t want to handle this argument in such a way that it can be gainsaid, nor without touching the very point. May I ask you to help me? You see how the question stands. How shall we best handle it?...

September 14, 1875.

... I have been crowded and much absorbed with my part of the California botany; get put back, by new collections, and have had the printer on my heels, which is not pleasant.

I have to drive with all my might, and am not yet clear, though I trust the worst is past. I get so fagged that when I sit down to Darwin’s “Insectivorous Plants,” by way of relaxation, of an evening, I fall asleep over it. And so have not finished that book yet, as it cannot be read with the eyes shut. I put off thought of all but my daily work till my task is done.

I thought I might have got up to see you, but I cannot now.

I see in the last “Nation” an article, which was evidently to have been continued, by Chauncey Wright, in which he points out clearly the essential difference between Darwinism, which is scientific, and Spencerism, which is “philosophical.” Save the mark!

Poor Wright,—your namesake—died suddenly of apoplexy, Sunday morning. He was a stanch Millite, and very acute and clear-headed.

September 15.

... A minister out in Illinois has written me, taking me seriously to task for altering my opinion after the age of forty-five, and for abetting disorder, by supporting theories that disturb the harmony of opinion that ought to prevail among scientific men.

He is one of those people who think that if you shut your eyes hard, it will answer every purpose; indeed, from the ease with which he confutes Darwinism, I suppose he finds no call even to shut his eyes.

November 10.

... Species, as I have said (in “Silliman’s Journal” articles) are not facts or things, but judgments, and, of course, fallible judgments; how fallible the working naturalist knows and feels more than any one else.

That the pages of a Flora or Fauna should give the idea of fixity and clear limitation which does not well or wholly represent the reality, is natural enough; is, indeed, inevitable. The object in these works is to set forth the differences, and put them in the strongest and clearest light, so that the forms may be readily discriminated. The nearer two forms are alike, the more pains the naturalist takes to set forth the differences, while the likeness “goes without saying,” and is therefore overlooked by the outsider, though it may have been almost an even chance that the describer merged the two in one.

The thoughtful and experienced naturalist does not get a wrong impression from all this, but the outsider almost certainly will.

A. G.

January 14, 1876.

Dear Mr. Wright,—Thanks for your line of the 8th.

By this week’s “Nation,”[99] you see that, long as the talk is, I have not yet touched the critical question, nor have I yet got an opportunity to apply myself to it. But I hope to do so soon.

Meanwhile, the number of the “Westminster Review,” which you called my attention to, has passed through my hands in our book club, and I shall soon have it in my hands again. It makes a very strong presentation, and the question is, how its points are to be met on purely scientific grounds. If I can meet them fairly, and reëstablish the evidence of design on the basis it ought to stand upon, I shall be satisfied and happy. Anyway, it is a help to me to have this able presentation brought before me....

May 21.

...I have here and there seen references to St. Augustine as maintaining views of indirect creation, such as now would be termed, or might be termed, evolutionary. Can you conveniently put me in the way of understanding his ideas? It is matter for you to work up in your article on Calvinism and Evolution....

December 20.

... Do you see No. 1 of the new agnostic weekly, “Evolution,” and its review of “Darwiniana”? It insists that such a world as ours is too full of imperfections to have had any intellectual originator....

TO JOHN H. REDFIELD.

July 1, 1876.

Dear Redfield,—I doubt if you know that the late John Stuart Mill, the philosopher, was a keen botanist. His herbarium, rich in European plants and with a good many Indian, etc. (small specimens from Royle, etc.), was given by his stepdaughter to Kew. But Hooker asked leave, after taking a certain amount, to present the rest to me, with leave to choose where all I did not care to have incorporated in the herbarium here should go to. I think it should go to a public herbarium, and as I think the Academy’s is not supplied well with European species of at all recent date, or recent collecting, perhaps it should go to you....

TO MRS. GRAY.

June 11, 1876.

... To get my train yesterday I had to leave the house at one. Dom Pedro till sixteen minutes of that, with Eliot, A. Agassiz, and two Brazilians. They came to the house, the door being open, and I received them in the library.... Sargent was with me to take him off my hands when I had to go. We treated him as we should any gentleman, though I believe I once addressed him as Your Majesty when flourishing the poison-bottle under his nose. He is a large, square-built, good-looking man of about my age, I think. Never did I have more questions to answer in ten minutes, nor questions more direct and to the point. Taken into the herbarium, he recognized what it was, complimented me by saying that my name was a well-known one (I suppose Agassiz had put him up to that), and I returned by saying that, in at least one case, we were members of the same botanical society.

“How many species of plants have you specimens of?” About 65,000.

“How do you arrange them?” Cases opened, and I began to show him.

“Please let me see some plant.”

I pulled out the genus cover first at hand, which happened to be European Saxifrages; opened. He took up a sheet.

“Saxifraga irrigua, European. I do not want to see plants of Europe. Let me see an American plant.”

I took another cover and showed Saxifraga peltata of California.

“Have you Sage-brush?” Yes.

“Let me see Sage-brush.”

I took him across the room to the Artemisias, and showed him, first, the one he saw so much of en route to California; second, the northern one to which Lewis and Clark gave the name at first.

“How do you prevent insects from destroying them?” They are all poisoned.

“What do you poison with?” Corrosive sublimate dissolved in alcohol.

“How do you use it?”

Here I ran off and brought back the poison-bottle, and applied the liquid to a specimen under the imperial nose.

I then ran off to set down the bottle in a safe place on the middle table, when he followed me up and asked:

“How strong do you make the solution?”

I gave him the answer as well as I could, when he turned to one of his suite:—

“Please write that down.”

And it was done accordingly. In the library I had displayed, enough to attract the eye, the bound volumes of “Flora Brasiliensis,” which he glanced at, and asked:—

“Have you the work on the botany of the vicinity of Rio Janeiro?”

I answered, Yes, thanks to Mr. Agassiz,—to whom the emperor had given it.

But he seemed uneasy until he saw it, and I put two of the folio volumes into his hands, which seemed to satisfy him.

Then, as he was passing on to the lecture-room, I slipped off. At head of Common, in Boston, I met C., who told me Dom Pedro was down at his museum at 7½ A.M. C. was not going to Hunnewell’s....

I amused them with the account of the conversation with the emperor.

The rhododendrons, and azaleas too, most splendid. Nothing like it at Philadelphia. The best as well as the most he ever had....

TO R. W. CHURCH.

August 3, 1876.

It is very good of you to write to me. I was about to drop you a line by the next post, when yours of the 21st came in.

My special object was to tell you that I have just had addressed to you, through the New York publishers, a little book, made up of scattered papers on Darwinian topics, which some of my friends thought it might be useful to collect. I somewhat mistrust their judgment, but have yielded to their request. There is nothing new in the volume, except a short essay on the hypothetical duration of species, and a rather long one at the end, upon teleology as affected by evolution, which I should be glad to have you read, and should like to know whether you think it hits the mark.

I have no idea who P. C. W. and the Westminster Reviewer may be, but I suspect they are one and the same. If you should know, please inform me.... Yes, it has been warm enough, and it was unceasingly so for twelve days. Mrs. Gray rushed to the seashore at Beverly; but I mainly stayed at home, kept out of the sun all I could, and rather enjoyed the heat than otherwise. But at the end I broke down; came all at once upon the novel sensation of being an old man. And so we hastened up and concluded an arrangement which had been left loosely and vaguely under consideration, viz., to revisit for myself, and to introduce Mrs. Gray to, the higher Alleghanies in Virginia, Carolina, and Tennessee, where I used to roam and botanize more than thirty years ago. We expect to set out in two or three weeks. It is not Switzerland, but it is a region of mountains, dells, and rills, and forests, which I have been longing to revisit. Oh, that you could be with us! Two botanists will join us at Philadelphia, and perhaps a third.

Among the very few copies of my “Darwiniana” which I have sent to England is one to the editor of the “Spectator,” whose ideas fit in with mine well, as I judge from reading the paper regularly. Do you know him? He is a very broad churchman.

I am just beginning to print a portion of my new “Flora of North America.” There can be no going to Europe for me till this volume or half volume is off my hands.

Dr. Gray enjoyed greatly the journey through the North Carolina mountains, and the traveling and accommodations were almost as rough as in the journeys thirty-three and thirty-five years before. The people, still cut off from the lower lands by roads that were mostly only used for horses, and where one traveled sometimes two or three days without meeting a wheeled vehicle, were very plain and primitive in their ways, and one had to depend at times on their hospitality for accommodations. But the scenery is striking and beautiful, and the forest unsurpassed for the magnificence of its grand trees, rich in variety and beauty. The party went first to New River Springs, then to the French Broad Hot Springs, and round by a rough journey to Asheville, then far away from railroads, where they were joined by Dr. and Mrs. Engelmann, and continued through the mountains to Cesar’s Head, whence they made their way by railroad through South Carolina and Georgia to Jonesboro; from Jonesboro going up Roan Mountain, a camping-out excursion.

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

December 5, 1876.

... Curious that one species should take pains to close fertilize some flowers, the other to cross all....

Now I want to beg of you to consider about a name for this kind of thing, on which, as a good judge, you could consult Bentham, or indeed, Hooker, if he can give it attention.

This matter will need to come into generic or specific characters, and therefore wants a terse and unambiguous mode of expression in a single word.

My old expression thirty or so years ago, “diœciodimorphous,” you reasonably objected to, implying separation of sexes (which, though, it need not do).

Yours of “dimorphous” should be, as the lawyers say, void for vagueness, there being plenty of other kinds of dimorphism in flowers.

Hildebrand’s, of “heterostylous,” the difference being in other things as well as style, and, I think, possible sometimes not in the style. The term will not work well in characters, whether in Latin or English. I have proposed, accordingly, in a little article not yet published, to use the term “heterogone,” in other form “heterogonous,” in Latin “Flores heterogoni,” with the counterpart “homogone,” “homogonous,” “Flores homogoni.”

This means, you see, explicitly, diverse genitalia, and the [Greek: gonê] is used as in the common botanical term “perigonium.”

TO R. W. CHURCH.

February 5, 1877.

Your friend Lord Blachford is an unrivaled expositor. I have just been reading, with extreme satisfaction, his article on the Reality of Duty. That naturally brought you to mind, and I vowed I would no longer be so negligent, but would acknowledge and thank you for your letter of August last, and for Professor Mozley’s sermons. They are excellent indeed, and it is saddening to have a man of such insight laid aside by illness, of a sort which probably does not diminish his desire, but destroys his power, to work....

I think Mrs. Gray has given some account of our summer vacation. I long to revisit those mountains when the Rhododendrons and Kalmias are in bloom, and to have your company.

We are just home, Mrs. Gray and I, from a fortnight with our friends at Washington,—a pleasant holiday, which of late I have always had at this season, the time of the annual meeting of the regents of the Smithsonian Institution, of which I am one of the lay (i. e., non-congressional) members. It makes a break in the monotony of our winter, which is far milder there than in New England, and the society at Washington is very pleasant. More and more men of mark, and intelligence, and cultivation reside there, at least for the winter months. We left on the day when the contested electoral count began, under the arrangement so happily and hopefully adopted. There is no excitement, and, outside of partisanship, little care which way it is determined, but much that it shall be legitimately determined by evidence, argument, and a decisive judgment.

I am deep in routine botanical work, and with a printer not far behind me, I can think of little else.

TO G. FREDERICK WRIGHT.

Cambridge, April 6, 1877.

Dear Mr. Wright,—What can I ever have said or written which President Fairchild takes to mean that I have the preposterous idea that “changes of environment take place in distinct and definite lines”! He may well ask if “this is not contrary to all evidence.” Even the conception that variation takes place in definite, or at least not in indefinite, lines is an idea which is rather thrown out as tenable, and as inferable from a good many facts, than as anything to swear by. I think so, yet, I am sorry to say, it is no part of Darwinism, pure and simple.

Now, in my turn, what does President F. mean by his “mere fact” “species exist”? That seems to me no fact at all, but an inference. Individuals exist; species are inferred from the relations the individuals are observed to sustain to each other. That species are distinct, in the sense of none blending, is what working naturalists would like to have somebody settle for them in many a troublesome case. That they always have been as much so as they are now is the question under consideration....

May 24.

... Now we can’t go to see you, sorry to say. The reason is, that I am working against time. Hooker is coming over, and we are going in summer to the Rocky Mountains together, according to an old promise of mine. To do it I ought to complete the printing of the part of my “Flora” which I am upon, else I shall suffer in various ways, and there is great danger that I fail.

... Do you notice—I know it will please you—how Kingsley caught at my essay, which was reprinted in England long ago; see his memoirs.

1877.

I would say to President Fairchild something like this:

Where only one individual out of a thousand or a million can survive to maturity and propagation, clearly only the very best adapted to the environment will so survive; and in somewhat different environments, only those best adapted respectively to the two, three, or more different environments. The intermediates, i. e., those least particularly adapted to the two or three different emergencies, surely have least chance.

Now our species of plants and animals are the comparatively few surviving lines of a great number of lines which have come down through long and various periods of great tribulation, in the literal sense of the word; they have been ground over and over, first on this trial, then on that, leaving, as it seems to me, no chance of the survival, side by side, of all sorts and shades of intermediate forms. Hence, under this, and the general law of heredity, the practical distinction of species and genera appears to be a natural result.

That low, and even the lowest, forms of life should survive and abound all down the ages, and be the most widely diffused over the earth, seems also the most natural result, being simple adaptations to simplest conditions of air and water, so nearly the same the world over. These are still far most numerous in individuals, and have, so to say, the surest hold on life. When we think of the vast void below which the “improvement” out of their sphere of these would leave, and the increased risks which complicated structure (in machines or beings) has to run, we shall not wonder that the simple still numerically predominate.

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

Cambridge, June 10, 1877.

My dear Mr. Darwin,—Except when you are to be aided in your work I decline to give letters of introduction to you, knowing how you are occupied and how infirm your health at any time may be. So please take this note to mean just this. The happy couple who bear it would be delighted to call some day, if you say so, and pay their respects to you, and I will tell you why I am disposed to promote their wishes.

Mr. Burgess[100] was a favorite pupil of mine, and is a young naturalist of much promise; not in my department, however, but in entomology. He takes particularly to the anatomy of insects, draws capitally, and shows talent for research, which we trust will bring forth good fruit. I cannot blame him if his modesty and caution have kept him back from publication as yet, but he has time before him, and even a sight of you will be a stimulus to his ambition as well as something to remember in after years. I need not say that he takes to Evolution; all young naturalists of any good do. He has just married the daughter of my dear old friend, the late Mr. Sullivant, who did for muscology in this country more than one man is likely ever to do again. The young lady is very dear to your good friend Mrs. Gray and to me; and, as you have more than once made a remark complimentary to American ladies, and as you are such an excellent judge, I must even give you the opportunity of extending your range of instances.

But please do not give our young friends the opportunity of calling upon you, unless it quite suits you.

By the time this reaches you, Dr. Hooker will be on the way to us, we expect, and we are looking to have a great run together over the Rocky Mountains, and perhaps across the Continent. Wherever we may be, you may believe me,

Always yours cordially, Asa Gray.

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

Cambridge, June 4, 1877.

My dear De Candolle: ... I meant to have a good portion of my “Synoptical Flora of North America” to send you this summer; but it will not be quite ready at the time I expected, and I am now likely not to have this summer for writing, but rather for observation over a considerable range of country. Dr. Hooker, it seems now almost certain, is coming over in a month from now. Dr. Hayden has invited him and me to join his expedition of exploration this year, or rather to make a survey of much of his ground in the Rocky Mountains; and it is possible we may even reach California. I am rather old for this work, but judging from last year, I may well endure and enjoy it. Would that you could join us!

We are in essential accord as to subgenus and its nomenclature. Your letter to Cogniaux discusses and decides—as I had done for myself—the questions propounded. You will see I follow it out consistently in my part of botany of California, while Watson was at sea in his, and would hardly be convinced by my arguments. But he tells me he is convinced by yours.

October 19.

... Our journey of ten and a half weeks, with Hooker, was a most enjoyable one, every way prosperous, but laborious. Colorado to the borders of New Mexico, a little of Utah and the Wahsatch mountains, and extensive traveling in California, as far south as Monterey, and north to Mt. Shasta. On return, I had Hooker’s copious collections to name up. I made only small and special collections, and most busy we were kept till, on the 6th inst., I put Hooker on the steamer, which, as telegraph tells us, only yesterday reached Queenstown, so he will be landing at Liverpool to-day,—a full fortnight from Boston to London. I am now busy enough with bringing up arrears of correspondence and affairs, and studying some collections which will not wait. Only by the end of this month shall I get to resume my regular, but long, interrupted work. Mrs. Gray accompanied us, and enjoyed it much, enduring well the occasional camp life and such hardship as there was. You should come over, and we will repeat the journey, but only three years hence. Much as I should enjoy it, I cannot spare the time sooner.

I found myself quite equal to younger people in mountain climbing....

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

Cambridge, July 4, 1877.

Dear old E.,—Never mind if you are seventy; Hooker is sixty, and I am between, and we are lively yet.

Perhaps we young fellows may knock about rather faster than you like, wanting to do much in a little time. But then, you need not do so much in Colorado as we; take the easy part.... I shall be sorry if you fail us.

We must twine in Cuscuta, as we twine in the rest of the book. For real accuracy we must finally come to the terms I propose, entropic and antitropic. We can’t get watch-hands into a good form for the description of order, genus, etc.

Be sure I’ll keep you posted. Should like to go to Iron Mountain.

Waiting on railroad from Cañon City to Pueblo, July 21, 1877.

... If this flowering Euphorbia is the one you asked for I have made good specimens. The round-leaved one is on the hills, and is not yet out; is not the one, I am sure.

We had yesterday a good day (with Brandegee)[101] at the Arkansas Cañon; it is grand, surely.

To-day Hooker and the Stracheys drive across and down Wet Mountain Valley to La Veta (two long days), while we, Mrs. Gray, Dr. Hayden, and I, return by railroad to Pueblo, and thence to La Veta, by sunset to-day. To-morrow up to a camp on La Veta Pass of Sangre de Christo Mountains, which Captain Stevenson is preparing.

Our English friends begin already to feel in a hurry, and for a wonder I am the hold-back member of the party....

Salt Lake, August 8.

I have yours of the 30th July, and I return inclosure. Write hereafter to the Palace Hotel, San Francisco.

I trust, and expect, that the strike days are over, and that you will severely punish the ringleaders.[102] Glad you have had nice weather; but you have no air like that of Colorado and Utah....

Well, much as we miss and want you, yet we should have hurried you too much. We want to go over a good deal of ground cursorily, rather than a little thoroughly and leisurely.

I do not write you about the oaks at Cañon City, because we had nothing new to say. We agree with you in the complete running together of the oaks down to Undulata. There is one very large-leaved state, looking very different; but it is mostly on fast-growing shoots, and no doubt is a state of the “Q. alba, var.” of Torrey. “Alba” indeed! But we did not find the entire-leaved form at the cañon, and Brandegee said it occurred only at the mouth of the cañon, and near the city.

From Cañon City we—Mrs. Gray, Hayden, and I—went in one day south to La Veta by rail, and the next day, toward evening, up to La Veta Pass, 10,300 feet, and over and 300 feet or so lower, where we camped, nice tents having been provided by Fort Lyon en route, and other furnishings from Fort Garland. Abies concolor abounded, though there was more of A. Menziesii (Picea pungens) and Pinus contorta, and a good amount of P. aristata and P. flexilis. The A. Menziesii at that elevation is less prickly, sometimes almost as soft as A. Douglasii to the touch, and cones inclined to be shorter. The result is, we think we can trace A. Engelmanni into A. Menziesii. What say you to that?

Botanizing up there and in Sangre de Christo Pass good, but only moderate; nothing new, and no great variety. We enjoyed camp life very well; but after three days broke up, and went over to Fort Garland, and thence, while the ladies and General Strachey went off to a Mexican village, we had a two days’ trip up the Sierra Blanca. Alpine plants the same as on Gray’s Peak, but scanty, owing to more southern latitude and greater dryness. A longer time and a searching of the interior of this very rough range might, and doubtless would, furnish much we did not see.

Returning from Fort Garland to the railroad, we went back to Colorado Springs and drove up to Manitou. Next day, we went up Ute Pass—nothing—and looked about. Next day, to Garden of the Gods, to General Palmer’s to early dinner, and thence to railroad and to Denver. Next day, Denver. Next by railroad through Clear Creek Cañon and to Georgetown, or within a mile, and thence up to Kelso’s Cabin, now a well-kept house, to sleep. Next day, Gray’s Peak, and I crossed over to the top of Torrey’s. Next day, after morning botanizing, came down to Georgetown and visited Empire City and the Pecks. Next day, Sunday, a restful morning, and then by rail back to Denver in the afternoon and evening. Monday, off at half past seven to Cheyenne, and after dinner took railroad to Ogden, and came up here last evening. To-day, a broken day, sight-seeing, etc. To-morrow, we, or some of us, are going south to American Fork Cañon; up that and over the pass into Cottonwood Cañon; down that, and back here, in time to go on that afternoon to Ogden and thence west to Reno, thence Virginia City, Carson, etc., and the Groves, Yosemite, etc. We shall see, and I will let you know.

Mrs. Gray is out with the party, to see things, and Brigham Young. I will not. She would be sending love to Mrs. Engelmann and you, if here. She is very well, and enjoying this travel hugely. I am strong, and ever yours,

Asa Gray.

Yosemite, Cal., August 21, 1877.

... So long without touching a pen I can hardly form letters. Did I write to you from Utah? We left direct route at Reno, went to Carson City, with détour to Virginia City,—queer place; first got hold of Pinus monophylla, but there no fruit.

Hired conveyance to take us from Carson right across the Sierra Nevada via Silver Mountain to Calaveras Big Trees,—a good way for studying the tree vegetation, and other, only all other is mainly destroyed by drought and sheep, and the ground is powdered dust. As we struck Pinus ponderosa we were struck with more tapering shape of tree and longer leaves than that of Colorado, so different, and soon, as we rose, by the immense size of cone, ovate, six inches long, very heavy. The big-cone ponderosa has less bright green and rather longer leaves, and cones looking quite different from the ordinary Californian ponderosa, which grows intermixed, except at the higher levels, and has long but narrow cones. Losing the big one as we descended to Calaveras, we come on it again in the Sierra here, when we get up to seven thousand to eight thousand feet. Here it passes for P. Jaffreyi or Jeffreyi. Is it so? Is it distinct? On bare side of Silver Mountain we found P. monophylla with cones, both maturing and this year’s....

Chico, September 5, 1877.

... Thanks for your letter to San Francisco. We are keeping lively; are on the way to Shasta.

What if we were to return via St. Louis: will you insure us against malaria and fever? Want to talk Coniferæ with you....

Cambridge, September 24, 1877.

We are just back via Niagara; Hooker and I via New York, and the former having the Sunday with Eaton at New Haven. All well and happy to get home after a prosperous and, as you may imagine, laborious journey of ten and a half weeks. The trip to Shasta involved long stagecoach journeys, but they were most interesting. Returning to Sacramento we went on to Truckee, where Lemmon[103] joined us by appointment. We gave one day to Mount Stanford and one to Tahoe, then took the overland train as it came on at midnight, and thence had no stationary bed till we reached Niagara. And we live to tell the story!

I want to tell you what we are led to think about Firs and Spruces. I will give in this my own opinions, which lie yet open, but are likely to settle down, except you convince me to the contrary on some points. Hooker comes to the same conclusions or nearly, but I will keep to my own only in this letter, and ask what you think of them, off-hand. Your reply will come to hand before Sir Joseph sails....

Some day you must have a picture of our camp on La Veta Pass. I wish there could have been one of the Shasta camp of the Bidwells.

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

Cambridge, September 27, 1877.

My dear Darwin,—Returning from our ten and a half weeks of travel, which has been every way prospered and pleasant, I find your book.[104] I can now barely thank you for it, and for the great compliment of the dedication. I must not open it till Hooker leaves me, a week hence, the work we have to do before we part being so great and pressing. Then I shall turn to it, with enjoyment, and as soon as I can find time I must notice or review it.

Hooker sends his love; is very glad Cohn has taken up your son’s experiments on Dipsacus, which reminds me to send my best thanks to him for the copy addressed to me. For perusal, even for a glance, that, too, must wait till we have worked up the collections and observations we have made in our journey to the Pacific.

Let me add, being sure of your sympathy, that our poor dog Max peacefully breathed his last to-day, after a happy life of twelve or thirteen years. We are glad he lived till we returned, and greeted us with his absorbing and touching affection. In a few days came a partial paralysis, some convulsions, and then a quiet and seemingly painless ending. He is immortalized in your book on Expression, and will live in the memory of his attached master and mistress.

Max was a black and tan terrier, not remarkable in any way for beauty or intelligence, but interesting from his warm affection and the power it had in developing his intelligence. To be near and to please his beloved master was enough for him. Anything his master did was right and to be submitted to. Max had conscience, but it did not restrain him from showing his vexation when left at home, by throwing Dr. Gray’s hat and gloves, etc., on the floor; but his shame and penitence always betrayed him. It seemed as if the joy of his master’s return had killed him.

Dr. Gray’s next pet was a very small puppy; so small that for the first few months Dr. Gray would drop him into his pocket when calling on certain friends. He was said to be a Japanese terrier, and grew to be a great beauty, with long, white, curling hair (with some black markings) to the tips of his ears and toes, and a tail like a plume, curling over his back, all so fluffy he was given the name of Puff. Dr. Gray always called him a “little pagan dog,” because, he said, his conscience was so unequally developed. But though willful and obstinate, with great self-sufficiency, he was very attractive. It was a piece of his mischief as a puppy that called out the following letter from his master to Rev. G. F. Wright.

TO G. FREDERICK WRIGHT.

Cambridge, December 11, 1878.

Rev. Sir,—Will you be so good as to accept a puppy’s penitent apologies for his naughtiness, and a new pair of rubbers in place of those which I wickedly destroyed, because it was “my nature to” at the time you last visited my master. I wish you to know that I am as sorry for it as I am capable of being, that I have been punished as well as scolded, and that the cost of the rubbers has been stopped out of my allowance.

So no more at present from your disobedient,

Jap. Puff.

Dr. Gray’s last dog was a beautiful spaniel, and had the same devoted love for him. He was very courteous and polite, and gentle and affectionate. He needed a great deal of outdoor exercise, and was so disconsolate and miserable at his master’s illness, that he was sent to kind friends, where he still keeps a warm and loving greeting for his old mistress.

TO R. W. CHURCH.

Cambridge, December 26, 1877.

Did I dispatch a line to you on or about October 1st,—one which would have crossed your last to me? If I did not, it shows how a continual and fixed intention works a sense of performance.

I took with me, on our travels, your letter of June 20, expecting to write you from the Rocky Mountains or some far-away Pacific region. But never were such busy people as Hooker and I the whole time. In fact, I was bound to make Hooker see just as much as possible within our limited time, and it seemed on the whole best for us to see very much in glimpses and snatches rather than far less more leisurely and thoroughly. He will have told you of our over nine thousand miles of travel together, and of how he liked it. I think Mrs. Gray and I enjoyed it most, and that we have a particular fancy for hurry-skurry journeying. We should like to do it all over, and more. But especially we should like to see California, in green attire. Not that we are not interested and taken with the sere aspect of these western regions in summer, which we fancy more than Hooker does. In fact, the greenness of England is so congenial to him that he took more delight in our eastern States, which he had mere glimpses of, than in all the wide western region, though of course there was more to learn in these.

How I wish you could have been of the party! We dream of doing some parts again, and of going both farther south and north, three years hence. You and Sir Joseph would not then be too old. But I can hardly expect then to be, as last summer, one of the most active and frisky members of the party.

Moreover, the cost in time is more than one counts on. From the middle of July to the end of September, one may, once in a way, fairly devote to holidaying. But then, after a week or two of work with Hooker over our notes and collections, I had to bring up long arrears, which I should have kept in hand if I had stayed at home, and so I have only now of late come to take up my regular work where I left it in July.

If you do not hear enough of our summer’s doings from Hooker,—and I know he must be busy indeed,—we must get Mrs. Gray to write a narrative; not that she is not also a busy soul.

All this time you have had anxious events to occupy your minds, and these are not yet over. But at home you are happy in the recovering health of your daughter after so long suffering.

We had our usual Christmas gathering last evening, and the house is only now set to rights again. Your old friends Miss P. and K. L. were with us, and we spoke of you. The latter told us that Miss S. proposes to come to us from the West Indies, I suppose in early summer, and glad we shall be to see her.