Asa Gray

“ Meanwhile, this man who has so long adorned his fair science by his labors and his life, even unto a hoary age, ‘bearing,’ as our poet says, ‘the white blossom of a blameless life,’ him, I say, we gladly crown, at least with these flowerets of praise, with this corolla of honor (his saltem laudis flosculis, hac saltem honoris corolla, libenter coronamus) . For many, many years may Asa Gray, the venerable priest of Flora, render more illustrious this academic crown. ”

“ Pray give my best regards to M. Boissier and to other friends in Geneva. I trust you will have safety and tranquillity in Switzerland. But it appears as if you would have war all around you,—a very sad state of things. Our latest intelligence looks very warlike, I am sorry to see. With all my heart I join in the supplication, “Give peace in our time, O Lord.” From such a war as is threatened no good can spring, in any result....
Ever and very cordially yours,
Asa Gray.
TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.
May 18, 1859. ”

“ Much of the good we see already, and more comes near to realization every day. So we work and trust, and suffer cheerfully. We only wish our views and motives were better appreciated in general in the country and by the people whose good opinion we most value. But even the lack of that appreciation, which is far from universal, is likely to do us good. I am always sure of your thoughtful good wishes for us. But I must break off.
Ever yours most sincerely,
Asa Gray.
TO A. DE CANDOLLE.
Cambridge, May 30, 1864. ”

“ It is not a year since I told Henry that he should have either Agassiz or Wyman at Washington, but that we must have one of them at Cambridge. Beyond all expectation we have them both!
Henry gave me—I know not what led to it—a full detailed account of his life from early boyhood, which was full of curious interest and suggested much matter for reflection. In the evening we fell to discoursing on philosophical topics, and Henry threw out great and noble thoughts, and as we both fell to conversing with much animation my headache disappeared entirely. ”

“ Gray was noticeable throughout his life for his alertness. In the street he was usually on a half run, for he never allowed himself quite time enough to reach his destination leisurely. When traveling by coach and climbing a hill he would sometimes alarm his fellow-travellers by suddenly disappearing through a window in his eagerness to secure some plant he had spied ”

“ The botanists of Goethe's day could not see any sense, advantage, or practical application, to be made of the proposition that the parts of a blossom answer to leaves; and so the study of homologies had long to wait. Until lately it appeared to be of no consequence whatever (except, perhaps, to the insects) whether Drosera and Sarracenia caught flies or not; and even Dionaea excited only unreflecting wonder as a vegetable anomaly. As if there were real anomalies in Nature, and some one plant possessed extraordinary powers denied to all others, and (as was supposed) of no importance to itself! ”

“ When will you see that there is only one end to all this, and that the North never dreams of any other,—the complete putting down of the rebellion. And since 1863 began, it was clear that it would be attended with the annihilation of slavery.
Time was when we should have highly valued English appreciation of the right cause. We have long ceased to care or think about it.
We only wish you had the city of New York. But the sympathizers with secession and riot there have done their worst, and lost their game. The city of New York is the only part of our country which I am ashamed of ”

“ May not those naturalists who, knowing far less of the laws of inheritance than does the breeder, and knowing no more than he does of the intermediate links in the long lines of descent, yet admit that many of our domestic races have descended from the same parents—may they not learn a lesson of caution, when they deride the idea of species in a state of nature being lineal descendants of other species? ”

“ 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. ”

“ And there is Switzerland always within reach. Happy mortals, who can reach the Alps within forty-eight hours, and with only a narrow, though proverbially nasty, bit of water to cross! But what we hope to gain from this upturning is to see you over here. When Mr. Horner returns (we have heard nothing since they vanished in the West) he will tell you it is no formidable matter even to cross the continent. At least you can come and see us, make us a long visit, and be as quiet here as in a Swiss wayside inn, and sally forth upon an excursion when you like. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She came late to Philadelphia, where Mrs. Gray (who was not at Montreal) and I had a most pleasant chat with her at a garden reception. The next day I went out to the suburban place where she was visiting, and came near to winning her for our expedition, at least as far as to Luray cave, and the Natural Bridge in the Valley of Virginia. But the engagements she had made could not be reconciled. Her hostess was to take her to this neighborhood, but too early for us to receive her here. All good people in this country think so much of Caroline Fox that they wished to know her sister. ”

“ Taking Nature as exhibiting thought for my guide, it appears to me that while human thought is consecutive, Divine thought is simultaneous, embracing at the same time and forever, in the past, the present and the future, the most diversified relations among hundreds of thousands of organized beings, each of which may present complications again, which to study and understand even imperfectly—as for instance man himself— mankind has already spent thousands of years. ”

“ My last visit to Washington was a sad one, to attend the funeral of my dear old friend Professor Joseph Henry, to whom we are all greatly indebted. When I saw him in January, at the annual meeting of the regents of the Smithsonian Institution, it was too evident that he would not much longer be with us.
As may be remembered, Dr. Gray, when in Paris in 1839, found in Michaux’s herbarium a plant which he describes as new, giving it the name of Shortia galacifolia, in honor of his old friend Dr. Short of Louisville, Ky. ”

“ I am not likely to be idle, and I care for nothing else. The difficulty is, that the university cannot well spare me now, nor find a fit person to take either the whole or a part of my work, but there is a good disposition to favor my views.
Charles Wright is helping me as curator of the herbarium, and is getting the large accessions into it—rather slowly.
The winter is nearly passed; I have employed diligently all the time I could command, but the net result looks small. All I have for the printer is a revision of Eriogoneæ, which I have turned over to him, and which you shall soon see. ”

“ Yet, unless it be thoroughly ingrained in the mind, I am convinced that the whole economy of Nature, with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood. We behold the face of Nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey ”

“ If he cannot recognize design in Nature because of evolution, he may be ranked with those of whom it was said, "Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe." How strange that a convinced theist should be so prone to associate design only with miracle!
All turns, however, upon what is meant by this Nature, to which it appears more and more probable that the being and becoming—no less than the well-being and succession—of species and genera, as well as of individuals, are committed. ”

“ The exterior is striking, quite of the old style, built of the same red bricks as the central portion of Versailles. What is most worth seeing here is the terrace, a beautiful park, extending for almost two miles along the brow of the high ridge, with the most beautiful view from it of the valley beneath and before you, the hills that bound your view, and the numerous villages scattered here and there. A finer situation cannot be imagined. The Seine, after passing Paris, makes a bold, double turn. ”

“ Let me now trace these principles as sources of action in Darwin's work or theory. Let us see how much there is of design acting to produce a foreseen end, and thus proving a reasoning and self-conscious Creator; and how much of mere blind power acting without rational design, or without a specific purpose or conscious foresight. Mr. Darwin has specified in a most clear and unmistakable manner the operation of his three great powers, or rather, the three great laws by which the organic power of life acts in the formation of an eye. ”

“ What a struggle between the several kinds of trees must here have gone on during long centuries, each annually scattering its seeds by the thousand; what war between insect and insect—between insects, snails, and other animals, with birds and beasts of prey—all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other or on the trees, or their seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of the trees! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not to insist that the likeness is after all the variable, not the constant, element—to learn which is the essential thing, resemblance among individuals or their genetic connection—we have only to ask which can be the cause of the other. ”

“ It is a truly wonderful fact—the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity—that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group, in the manner which we everywhere behold—namely, varieties of the same species most closely related together, species of the same genus less closely and unequally related together, forming sections and sub-genera, species of distinct genera much less closely related, and genera related in different degrees, forming sub-families, families, orders, sub-classes, and classes. ”

“ I grind away at “Flora,” but, like the mills of the gods, I grind slowly, as becomes my age,—moreover, to continue the likeness, I grind too “exceedingly fine,” being too finical for speed, pottering over so many things that need looking into, and which I have not the discretion to let alone. Consequently the grist of each day’s work is pitiably small in proportion to the labor expended on it. I am now at Malvaceæ, which I once enjoyed setting to rights, and of which the North American species have got badly muddled since I had to do with them. ”

“ The situation, close down upon the water and in the bosom of green undulating hills, is as lovely as can be conceived, and is in fine contrast with the upper extremity of the little lake, where the dark and lofty mountains rise abruptly from the very edge of the water, not leaving room enough even for a footpath. ”

“ They largely belong to countries which have a long hot season of little or no rain, when, their stalks and foliage above and their roots beneath early perishing, the plants rest securely in their compact bulbs, filled with nourishment and retaining their moisture with great tenacity, until the rainy season comes round. Then they shoot forth leaves and flowers with wonderful rapidity, and what was perhaps a desert of arid sand becomes green with foliage and gay with blossoms, almost in a day. ”

“ We cling to a long-accepted theory, just as we cling to an old suit of clothes. A new theory, like a new pair of breeches (the Atlantic still affects the older type of nether garment) , is sure to have hard-fitting places; or, even when no particular fault can be found with the article, it oppresses with a sense of general discomfort. New notions and new styles worry us, till we get well used to them, which is only by slow degrees. ”

“ The mountains, lakes, and valleys were all distinct, but looked cold. At length{244} a blast from a wooden trumpet (a better instrument than you would think) announced sunrise, and the sun appeared between two strips of cloud, lighting up first the distant and high peaks and glaciers of the Bernese Alps, the Jungfrau, the Finster-Aarhorn, the Titlis, highest of all,—the white glaciers shining like burnished silver. Soon the serrated ridge of the gloomy Pilatus is lighted up; the dark valleys become more distinct ”

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