Asa Gray

“ Darwin's handling.
A propos to these papers, which furnish excellent illustrations of it, let us recognize Darwin's great service to Natural Science in bringing back to it Teleology: so that, instead of Morphology—versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedded to Teleology. To many, no doubt. Evolutionary Teleology comes in such a questionable shape as to seem shorn of all its goodness; but they will think better of it in time, when their ideas become adjusted, and they see what an impetus the new doctrines have given to investigation. ”

“ Now, the only known cause of such likeness is inheritance, and as all transmission of likeness is with some difference in individuals, and as changed conditions have resulted, as is well known, in very considerable differences, it seems to me that if the high antiquity of our actual vegetation could be rendered probable, not to say certain, and the former habitation of any of our species, or if very near relatives of them in high northern regions could be ascertained, my whole case would be made out. ”

“ The harmony of Nature and its admirable perfection need not be regarded as inflexible and changeless. Nor need Nature be likened to a statue, or a cast in rigid bronze, but rather to an organism, with play and adaptability of parts, and life and even soul informing the whole. ”

“ Organic Nature, by which I mean the system and vitality of living things, their adaptation to each other and to the world, with all its apparent and indeed real stability, should be likened, not to the ocean, which varies only by tidal oscillations from a fixed level to which it is always returning, but rather to a river so vast that we can neither discern its shores nor reach its sources, whose onward flow is no less actual because too slow to be observed by the ephemera which hover near its surface or are borne upon its bosom. ”

“ TWO British naturalists, Robert Brown and Charles Darwin, have, more than any others, impressed their influence upon Science in this nineteenth century. Unlike as these men and their works were and are, we may most readily subserve the present purpose in what we are called upon to say of the latter by briefly comparing and contrasting the two.
Robert Brown died sixteen years ago, full of years and scientific honors, and he seems to have finished, several years earlier, all the scientific work that he had undertaken. ”

“ I considered that our own vegetation, or its proximate ancestry, must have occupied the arctic and sub-arctic regions in Pliocene times, and that it had been gradually pushed southward as the temperature lowered and the glaciation advanced even beyond its present habitation; that plants of the same stock and kindred, probably ranging round the arctic zone as the present arctic species do, made their forced migration southward upon widely-different longitudes, and receded more or less as the climate grew warmer ”

“ Were they created, thus local and lonely, denizens of California only; one in limited numbers in a few choice spots on the Sierra Nevada, the other only along the Coast Range from the bay of Monterey to the frontiers of Oregon? Are they veritable Melchisedeks, without pedigree or early relationship, and possibly fated to be without descent? Or are they now coming upon the stage (or rather were they coming but for man's interference) to play a part in the future? ”

“ If the taxodium of the Tertiary time in Europe and throughout the arctic regions is the ancestor of our present bald cypress, which is assumed in regarding them as specifically identical, then I think we may with our present light fairly assume that the two redwoods of California are the probable descendants of the two ancient species which so closely resemble them. The forests of the arctic zone in Tertiary times contained at least three other species of Sequoia, as determined by their remains, one of which, from Spitzbergen, also much resembles the common redwood of California. ”

“ Darwin takes his readers into his confidence, freely displays to them the sources of his information and the working of his mind, and even shares with them all his doubts and misgivings, while in a clear and full exposition he sets forth the reasons which have guided him to his conclusions. ”

“ Although no account and no photographic representation of either species of the far-famed Sequoia trees can give an adequate idea of their singular majesty—still less of their beauty—yet my interest in them did not culminate merely nor mainly in consideration of their size and age. Other trees in other parts of the world may claim to be older. ”

“ Yet, instead of taking the single forward step which now seems so obvious, he even hazarded the conjecture that the insect-forais of some Orchideous flowers are intended to deter rather than to attract insects. And so the explanation of all these and other extraordinary structures, as well as of the arrangement of blossoms in general, and even the very meaning and need of sexual propagation, were left to be supplied by Mr. Darwin. The aphorism "Nature abhors a vacuum" is a characteristic specimen of the Science of the middle ages. ”

“ No matter how wonderful, how beautiful, how intimately complex and delicate has been the machinery which has worked, perhaps for centuries, perhaps for millions of ages, to bring about some beneficent result, if we can but catch a glimpse of the wheels, its divine character disappears. ”

“ Here are four most peculiar genera of one family, each of a single species in the Atlantic United States, which are duplicated on the other side of the world, either in identical or almost identical species, or in an analogous species, while nothing else of the kind is known in any other part of the world. ”

“ The larger part of the genera of our own region which I have enumerated as wanting in California are present in Japan or Mantchooria, along with many other peculiar plants divided between the two. There are plants enough of the one region which have no representatives in the other. There are types which appear to have reached the Atlantic States from the South, and there is a larger infusion of subtropical Asiatic types into temperate China and Japan ”

“ Under the former view, Nature would be "the faultless monster which the world ne'er saw," but inscrutable as the Sphinx, whom it was vain, or worse, to question of the whence and whither. Under the other, the perfection of Nature, if relative, is multifarious and ever renewed ”

“ When we consider that a hand's-breadth at the circumference of any one of the venerable trunks so placarded has recorded in annual lines the lifetime of the individual thus associated with it, one may question whether the next hand's-breadth may not measure the fame of some of the names thus ticketed for adventitious immortality. ”

“ Our Northern fox-grape, Vitis labrosca, is wholly confined to the Atlantic States, except that it reappears in Japan and that region. Wistaria was named for a woody leguminous climber, with showy blossoms; native of the Middle Atlantic States. The other species which we prize so highly in cultivation, W. sinensis, is from China, as its name indicates, or perhaps only from Japan, where it is certainly indigenous. Our yellow-wood (cladrastis) inhabits a very limited district on the western slope of the Alleghanies. ”

“ Now, although I have cultivated the field of North American botany with some assiduity for more than fifty years, have reviewed our vegetable hosts, and assigned to no small number of them their name and their place in the ranks, yet, so far as our own wide country is concerned, I have been, to a great extent, a close botanist. ”

“ Passing on from the eastern district, marked by its equally-distributed rainfall, and therefore naturally forest-clad, I have seen the trees diminish in numbers, give place to wide prairies, restrict their growth to the borders of streams, and then disappear from the boundless drier plains; have seen grassy plains change into brown and sere desert—desert in the common sense, but hardly anywhere botanically so—have seen a fair growth of coniferous trees adorning the more favored slopes of a mountain-range, high enough to compel summer showers ”

“ Such ideas as these, though still repugnant to some, and not long since to many, have so possessed the minds of the naturalists of the present day that hardly a discourse can be pronounced or an investigation prosecuted without reference to them. I suppose that the views here taken are little, if at all, in advance of the average scientific mind of the day. I cannot regard them as less noble than those which they are succeeding. ”

“ To the other, Charles Darwin, a fair number of productive years may yet remain, and are earnestly hoped for. Both enjoyed the great advantage of being all their lives long free from any exacting professional duties or cares, and so were able in the main to apply themselves to research without distraction and according to their bent. ”

“ If allowed to borrow a simile from the language of my own profession, I might liken the President of this Association to a biennial plant. He flourishes for the year in which he comes into existence, and performs his appropriate functions as presiding officer. When the second year comes round he is expected to blossom out in an address and disappear. Each president, as he retires, is naturally expected to contribute something from his own investigations, or his own line of study ”

“ Fossil specimens of a similar, if not the same, species have been recently detected in the Rocky Mountains by Hayden, and determined by our eminent paleontological botanist, Lesquereux, and he assures me that he has the common redwood itself from Oregon, in a deposit of Tertiary age. Another Sequoia (Sequoia stembergii) , discovered in Miocene deposits in Greenland, is pronounced to be the representative of Sequoia gigantea, the big tree of Californian sierra. ”

“ Most of these, it will be noticed, have their nearest or their only living representatives in the Atlantic States, and, when elsewhere, mainly in Eastern Asia. Several of them, or of species like them, have been detected in our Tertiary deposits west of the Mississippi by Newberry and Lesquereux. Herbaceous plants, as it happens, are rarely preserved in a fossil state, else they would probably supply additional testimony to the antiquity of our existing vegetation, its wide diffusion over the northern and more frigid zone, and its enforced migrations under changes of climate. ”

“ The point to be remarked is that a very large proportion of the genera and species which are peculiar to North America as compared with Europe, and largely peculiar to Atlantic North America as compared with the California region, are also represented in Japan and Mantchooria, either by identical or by closely-similar forms. ”

“ They are much mistaken who suppose that Darwinism is only of speculative importance and perhaps transient interest. In its working applications it has proved to be a new power, eminently practical and fruitful. ”

“ And these repositories of Eastern-American types in Japan and neighboring districts are in all degrees if likewise. Sometimes the one is undistinguishable from the other; sometimes there is a difference of as great but hardly of as tangible character; sometimes the two would be termed marked varieties if they grew naturally in the same forest, or in the same region; sometimes they are what the botanists call representative species, the one answering closely to the other, but with some differences regarded as specific ”

“ We have it also from Corea and Northern Japan. The Jesuit fathers identified the plant in Canada and the Atlantic States, brought it in the Chinese name by which we know it, and established the trade in it, which was for many years most profitable. The exportation of ginseng to China probably has not yet entirely ceased. Whether the Northeastern Asiatic and the Atlantic American ginsengs are exactly of the same species or not is somewhat uncertain, but they are hardly if at all distinguishable. ”

“ The nature of his latest researches accounts for most of the difference, but not for all. The Origin of Species is a fascinating topic, having interests and connections with every branch of Science, natural and moral. The investigation of recondite affinities is very dry and special ”

“ In this these two naturalists seem to us, each in his way, preëminent. There is a characteristic likeness, too—underlying much difference—in their admirable manner of dealing with facts closely and at first hand, without the interposition of the formal laws, vague ideal conceptions, or "glittering generalities," which some philosophical naturalists make large use of. ”

“ The remarkable facts in regard to the Northeast American and Northeast Asiatic floras, which these speculations were to explain, have since increased in number, more especially through the admirable collections of Dr. ”