book is,--Michaux, whose name is on the work, Richard, who wrote it
incog.
I inclose my last from Grisebach. I am hoping to arrange to have the
catalogue of Cuba plants printed or stereotyped at Göttingen, for the
Smithsonian contributions, and have written Grisebach to cultivate his
Spanish influence in the view of having that government at length
patronize effectively the bringing out of a Flora Cubensis, by Wright
and Grisebach.
You owe this letter partly to the general disturbance of an uneasy
conscience, and partly to a sudden cold caught by carelessness in hot
weather, which unfits me for more driving work. It is getting better. I
hope to write you again before I catch a new one.
July 4, Eighty-ninth Anniversary
of the United States.
Yours of June 9-21 reached me the very day that I mailed my last missive
to you, a good long letter. Here is a fine letter from you, showing how
busy and active a man you are. Pretty well for a man of your age to be
shinning up palm-trees, and barking your shins. Be careful! Grisebach
will take your criticisms all right, no doubt. Yesterday I got the
inclosed from him. Very well. Is the Cuban M. Sauvalle?...
Dr. Hooker has sent me a specimen of Welwitschia, that queer African
tree a foot high, many years old, and with only two leaves, and those
all in shreds....
September 5.
... Dear, good Sir William Hooker is dead,--of diphtheria,--on the 15th
August, six weeks over eighty years. I have no news yet from the family;
but learn indirectly that Dr. Hooker is sick, “a gastric affection.” I
do hope it is nothing dangerous....
* * * * *
Dr. Gray wrote for the “American Journal of Science”[61] a memoir of
his dear friend, Sir William Hooker, in which, after describing his
immense labors in publications of so many different branches, he says:--
“Our survey of what Sir William Hooker did for science would be
incomplete indeed if it were confined to his published works, numerous
and important as they are, and the wise and efficient administration
through which, in a short space of twenty-four years, a queen’s flower
and kitchen garden and pleasure grounds have been transformed into an
imperial botanical establishment of unrivaled interest and value.
Account should be taken of the spirit in which he worked, of the
researches and explorations he promoted, of the aid and encouragement he
extended to his fellow-laborers, especially to young and rising
botanists, and of the means and appliances he gathered for their use no
less than his own.
“The single-mindedness with which he gave himself to his scientific
work, and the conscientiousness with which he lived for science while he
lived by it, were above all praise. Eminently fitted to shine in society
... he never dissipated his time and energies in the round of
fashionable life, but ever avoided the social prominence and worldly
distractions which some sedulously seek....
“Nor was there in him the least manifestation of a tendency to
overshadow the science with his own importance, or of indifference to
its general advancement....
“To the wide circle of botanists in which he has long filled so
conspicuous a place, ... it is superfluous to say that Sir William
Hooker was one of the most admirable of men, a model Christian
gentleman.”
Dr. Gray was appointed by Mr. Peabody himself a member of the “Board of
Trustees of the Peabody Museum of American Archæology and Ethnology in
connection with Harvard University” when it was founded in 1866. The
Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, offering the resolutions in memory of Dr. Gray,
at the meeting in 1888, says, “From first to last, as I can bear
witness, he was a most faithful and valuable member of our Board; he was
always at our meetings and took an active interest in all our work. In
1874, on the death of Jeffries Wyman, he voluntarily assumed the
curatorship of our Museum, and did excellent service until the
appointment of Professor Putnam.”
TO R. W. CHURCH.
Sunday evening, February 25, 1866.
The number of the “Guardian” followed closely upon your note of the 9th
instant, and I have just risen from the reading of your review of “Ecce
Homo.” I knew nothing of this remarkable book, beyond having seen the
title. The notice in the “Spectator” had escaped me, or rather, through
a change in the order of circulation in our book club, that number of
“Spectator” has not yet come round to me. But I have to thank you
heartily for calling my attention to it, and especially for sending me
your own published and well-considered thoughts of it. I greatly admire
your analysis of the book, and what I thus learn of it greatly impresses
me. I shall procure it without delay. I long, not only to read it
myself, but to put it into the hands of some friends. Such a production
is timely, and will be very useful. I hope the unknown writer will go
on, and as he goes on bring out, in the same fresh and untechnical way,
all the essentials of Christian belief. Even if he does not, it will
have great value as it is; and one will be curious to see how he can
fail to raise the superstructure which this foundation seems to be
designed to bear. I have long thought it very important that these
subjects and the whole range of connected questions need to be treated
by a layman from an unprofessional point of view, and quite apart from
theological language or conventional modes of thought, say by a lawyer
of a judicial turn of mind, or by a physicist or naturalist, who
understands and feels the scientific difficulties, and the prevalent
state of mind, especially among scientific people, which most divines
persist in ignoring.
As soon as I get this book, and have attentively read it, I shall
probably wish to speak of it again to you. If I find that it does not
receive notice in this country, I will see that attention is in some way
called to it. But I should think it likely to attract attention in this
country at once.
I have never thanked you for your letter of December 6, and for the
hope, faint though it be, that you may come over and see us some day.
Pray don’t give over the thought, and some day you may chance to bring
it about. Cambridge is not a bad point from which to sally forth in
little explorations of American life....
We have much anxiety as to what we can do with the South now we have got
it; and our President Johnson is not a Lincoln. The breach which has
just occurred, and which may cause great trouble, has been feared for
some time; and the blame is to be assigned in part to the indiscretion
and impracticability of a few of the advanced Republican leaders. We
have survived worse scenes and darker prospects, and shall surmount
these troubles, I trust, in time. But here things cannot always be done
in the wisest way....
I imagine Earl Russell is safe for a year or two, since no other minstry
could well be found to replace him. I should like, before long, to see
Gladstone at the helm.
TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.
... The small parcel from Andersson[62] has come. From him I have a nice
oil copy of the portrait of Linnæus,[63] painted by Madame Andersson.
Chapman[64] is here, excellent, loyal man all through; hates
copperheads; is soon going back, so that you can write him at
Apalachicola for Junci. I have told him what you are at with the genus.
March 20, 1866.
I have got Mann[65] well installed in Fendler’s place, and he is doing
well, doing botanical work, too, on his Sandwich Island plants; will
bring out an Enum. Pl. Hawaiens....
July 30.
Back to-day from a coasting voyage of four or five days, I find yours of
25th instant....
I have promised Clinton[66] I will go to Buffalo, to the meeting
reviving the American Association; then back home, to work, by 20th
August.
About the Prussian war I think as you do. About domestic matters I have
not changed at all my mode of thinking, as I know. But no time for these
things....
TO CHARLES WRIGHT.
May 19, 1866.
... I am so driven, so distracted. Bless your stars you are not a
professor, and president of Academy, and have a botanical garden and no
gardener well trained, and have students, and everything. My
correspondence all in arrears, and I am getting hardened and don’t
care....
You know I am always hard pressed and hard worked at this season; and
this year it is far worse than ever. Besides the bother of my classes,
unusually bothering on the new arrangement, there is a new gardener and
a great deficit or rather deficiency of funds to carry on the Garden, so
I have to run that concern pretty much myself. And, to crown all, my
little new French gardener, in his anxiety over the work, has got into a
state of nervous excitement, gets no sleep nights, and if not soon
relieved will, I fear, become truly insane.... If he continues half
crazed, you may expect me crazed next. Then there are some special
scientific students working up here, to add to my botheration.
So do not you “growl” at me now if you can help it....
Alas, your Algæ will be too late for dear Harvey. He is dying of
consumption, and we may hear of the end any day. This is all at present
from
Your old, worn-out friend,
ASA GRAY.
TO GEORGE BENTHAM.
June 12, 1866.
We have as many asters as we can manage in America, and in the northern
hemisphere of the Old World. I pray you keep out at least Australian
things if it be possible.
I envy you more and more in being able to devote yourself to systematic
botany steadily, without the distraction and sad consumption of time in
professional and administrative duties and avocations, which make havoc
of the opportunities of most botanists, and make their work which they
are able to do far less valuable than it would otherwise be. And you
work on with such quiet determination! The lamented losses of the last
year or two have already made you the Nestor, though I cannot think you
old. I do hope you have a fair number of good working years yet, in
which you can make your great experience tell to utmost advantage....
Much against my will, I have this summer to work upon a new edition of
my “Manual of the Northern United States Botany,” to which there is much
to be done. I shall not, however, so recast the work as I should if I
could defer it till I had blocked out the outlines of a similar but much
larger volume for all the United States of America, and till your
“Genera Flora” had been carried much farther.
What do you intend for this summer? A Continental excursion?
Ever, my dear Bentham, most cordially yours,
A. GRAY.
Dr. Farlow, in his memoir in “Proceedings of the American Academy,”
speaks of the great interest which Dr. Gray took at this time in
observing tendrils and climbing plants. The glass corridor then
connecting the herbarium and his study was very much occupied by
climbers, and notes were constantly taken of times of revolution, etc.
He says, “Dr. Gray hardly ever passed in or out of the herbarium without
stroking (patting them on the back by way of encouraging them, it almost
seemed) the tendrils of the climbers on the walls and porch; and on the
announcement that a student had discovered another case of
cross-fertilization in the garden, he would rush out bare-headed and
breathless, like a schoolboy, to see the thing with his own critical
eyes.”
TO CHARLES DARWIN.
May 7, 1866.
I am so delighted to get a letter from you, written with your own hand,
and to see that you can work again a little.
I have no new facts about the influence of pollen on fruits, nor about
influence of grafts.
I have got a little plant of Bignonia capreolata growing here. I punched
a lot of holes into the shady side of a lath; the tendrils thrust their
ends in; also into a cornice, but did not stay; either the movement of
the stem or tendril, or, at length, the shortening of the body of the
tendril by coiling, which it does promptly, brought all away. I have
stuck some cotton on to the lath at the proper height for the next pair
of tendrils. The tendril near by stuck fast at once, and is beginning to
develop the disks, and now the tendril of the other leaf has bent
abruptly round, and seized the cotton with avidity. Are there any new
observations I can make?
The Fenian scare, we have supposed here, was mainly a plan of certain
rogues here to fleece their poor countrymen and women, poor servants and
working-men! Nothing more could come of it. But I sadly fear many here
have enjoyed the trouble it has given and the alarm it has excited,
especially among our neighbors in New Brunswick, who rather enjoyed our
woes two or three years ago.
Yes, slavery is thoroughly done for. We have a bad set to deal with at
the South; and holding wolf by the ears is no pleasant nor hopeful
occupation, as the temper of the wolf does not improve under the
holding. But we shall jangle out of the difficulty in time, even with
such a crooked character as our President to deal with also.
Bring out the book on Variation soon.
July 3.
... So there is war on the Continent; really a war “for empire,” as Lord
Russell said our war was. Now our war was a simple necessity; this
Continental one a crime, in which all parties participate. I wish, but
do not expect, Prussia to be crushed as one result. I wish all her coast
could be annexed to Denmark! However, it is no affair of ours, being on
the other side of the Atlantic. And when a nation can get strength and
power by robbery, it will be likely to rob.
August 7.
... You should study Wyman’s observations in his own papers. He is
always careful to keep his inferences close to his facts, and is as good
an experimenter, I judge, as he is an observer. He has a new series of
observations to publish. I think that he has not at all pronounced in
favor of spontaneous generation, but I will bet on his experiments
against Pasteur, any day.
TO CHARLES WRIGHT.
November 23.
You may well complain that I neglect you. But--
1. I had, till now, nothing special to write.
2. I have been daily expecting to hear from Grisebach, and have sheets
to send you, or the copies via Westermann. But not a bit of it yet. The
conquest of Hanover by the Prussians seems to have annihilated
Grisebach.
3. I have been, am so--_busy_ is not the word for it. I can’t think of
any to express it. I suppose that I have now lying by me more than fifty
unanswered letters, though I keep answering the most pressing as fast
nearly as they come in. But the rest get neglected, inevitably. I read
your letters and follow your work in Cuba with interest. I want you to
get all the plants you can (but I see not that you can exhaust Cuba),
and then come and settle down here, and work up, as you only can, a nice
Flora Cubana. That you are bound to do, just as I am to do the Flora of
North America. I see some faint prospect that I may yet, and before very
long, be able to sit down to it. But you and I are bound to do these two
things yet!...
The seeds I put loose in this sheet are Cinchona officinalis. Get the
tree introduced into your cooler region, that is, the Caffetals of east
Cuba, and the tree will be commercially important in time, and you will
be a benefactor of your species. Enough for once.
Ever your old friend,
A. GRAY.
TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.
November 20, 1866.
DEAR ENGELMANN,--Yes, I have a heap of unanswered letters from you. But
I have not one moment of time.
I have copy of “Manual” in printer’s hands up to Compositæ, and am only
now two days ahead; have been only two hours ahead day after day!! It is
awful! So much other work too!...
If I could get five hundred to one thousand more a year I would at once
resign professorship and salary....
I am well, never more hearty; but worked like a coach-horse. I have got
my fund raised for the Garden: small, but we have now clear $2,500 or
$2,600 a year for Garden.
February 27, 1867.
How much I am indebted to you! No one else who undertakes to help me
ever makes out much, at least to save me time and trouble....
I have not time to write details of the little I know about the National
Academy. But I have seen enough to make it clear that I should not be
taking any more responsibility about it. So last month I sent my
resignation. They have put me on the list of Honorary Members. The
American Academy is as much as I want to attend to, and I do my duty to
society in looking well after that....
TO A. DE CANDOLLE.
September 10, 1866.
... The war near you was sharp and quick. Switzerland is as fortunately
placed as any small nation can be, when surrounded by strong ones; but
you see that in this world only strength can be relied on. See what
indignity small and weak nations have to suffer. I trust present peace
may last to consolidate a new Germany. But if not, you may have to dread
a more general upturning on the Continent.
October 21, 1867.
... Your analysis of the whole subject of rules in nomenclature I think
is sound and lawyer-like, or rather _judicial_, as well as judicious.
There are dangers and inconveniences on every side, and good sense and
discretion are needed in the application of these as of all rules....
Very faithfully yours,
ASA GRAY.
TO GEORGE BENTHAM.
January 21, 1867.
MY DEAR BENTHAM,--Many thanks for your kind remembrance of us in your
letter at the end of the year, which reached me only three or four days
ago. I avail myself of the first foreign post since to return, with Mrs.
Gray’s love, our heartiest good wishes to Mrs. Bentham and yourself, and
I trust you will be able to keep up yet, for a good many precious years,
the steady botanical work which you make so telling....
I have no doubt of the full and entire correctness of the principles you
work on; and the Kew Floras and the “Genera Plantarum” will more than
anything else determine the public botanical opinion and mode of working
for the next generation. But I suspect that there will remain after all
a great many monotypic genera (consider how many of the most distinct
genera are so, or nearly so); and I imagine it is best to work without
prejudice for or against them.
I dare promise I shall be satisfied with all you have done in Compositæ.
As to Umbelliferæ, I wish you joy of the job, and do hope you will
reduce the genera twenty per cent at least. I never could take the least
satisfaction in them. I never could collate our Umbelliferæ with
European genera, and I have no clear conception of more than half a
dozen of our genera....
Ever, dear Bentham, yours most cordially,
A. GRAY.
TO CHARLES DARWIN.
CAMBRIDGE, March 26, 1867.
This is to acknowledge yours of February 28.
You see I have printed your queries[67] privately (fifty copies), as the
best way of putting them where useful answers may be expected. Most of
them will go into the hands of agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, etc.
Others to persons I or Wyman may know and rely on. I wish I had had them
sooner. My crony Wyman has been two months in Florida, but will be home
again before I could send to him.
I did not write the article in the “Nation” on Popular Lecturing, though
it contains so many things I have said over and over that it startled
me. Then it hits so many nails square on the head that I should think it
could be written only in Cambridge or hereabouts.
It is generally supposed to be written by a person in New York, but I
suspect a person near by here,--only suspect....
Yes, Magnolia seeds hang out awhile in autumn, finally stretch and break
the threads of spiral vessels. Whether birds eat them I don’t know. They
look enticing and have a pulpy coat, are bitter and spicy.
Shall I send you more of these circulars?
I shall send to Indian people too.
TO CHARLES WRIGHT.
April 2, 1867.
I sent your twenty dollars to aid the subscription for the starving
Southerners. There have been handsome sums raised for them in the
Northern States. But I am afraid you must get most imperfect and
one-sided statements of the doings of Congress by the tone of your
letters, and decidedly need enlightenment. It is the President, not
Congress, that needs to learn the Constitution and the laws of the land.
And your Southern loyal friends, if you could get voice of them, would
beg Congress to take even more urgent steps for their protection and
defense by reconstruction. However, things seem to be going on now
pretty satisfactorily. The President is sinking into his deserved
insignificance, and the leading rebels are coming out decidedly more
sensibly than many of their professed Northern friends. And we hope,
therefore, that they may begin to give some fair chance to the loyal men
of the South to be heard and to get their rights, which have been
indeed shamefully trampled upon by the President and the dominant party
at the South....
I have not time to answer all your interesting botanical notes, and can
only thank you for them. I hope you will continue to keep well.
Our spring is late and wet. There is still quite a covering of snow in
the garden, and we have had a deal of it in the winter, and wretched
walking and getting about in every way. Happy you, in the tropics.
You ask who Austin[68] is. He was an old protégé of Dr. Torrey; lives
now in New Jersey, and studies Lemnaceæ and Hepaticæ.
... You will be more delighted than I am to know that the Democrats have
probably carried Connecticut. But I am not much the contrary; for the
Republicans are too many in Congress for their own good, or ours, and it
secures the defeat of Barnum for Congress; as it should be....
April 8.
I have been having a Sunday’s work over your plants.
It grieves my heart and will grieve yours badly when I tell you that
your boxes were put under a cargo of wet sugar, which drained into them,
and have ruined the collection.
... As to specimens to dispose of, say only one half or one third of the
whole mass is left fit for it. Oh dear! God grant you patience! Will you
have the courage to set to work over again?
I will try next to tell you what is worst.
Ever your disconsolate,
A. GRAY.
TO WILLIAM M. CANBY.[69]
July 8, 1867.
MY DEAR CANBY, ... I am charmed with what you say of Dionæa, can confirm
some of it, and believe all the rest. Never mind the anatomy of the leaf
now--little promise from that; but do go on with experiments on feeding,
and record them carefully, and publish when ready.
I am going to send your letter to Darwin, who will be delighted, and
will probably suggest experiments. He has an eminently suggestive mind.
I suppose you know the slow way Drosera rotundifolia catches flies,
doubtless for same purpose, though it can absorb the juices only through
its bristles. I always thought it took in only the gases disengaged by
putrefaction.
If you don’t know the trick of Drosera, which you should study, too, I
will tell you, if you write to me at Sauquoit, Oneida County, New York.
SAUQUOIT, N. Y., July 17.
I have here yours of 13th.
If on leaf of Drosera rotundifolia, in good healthy condition, you put a
small fly--somewhat crippled is surer--the sticky pellucid glands will
hold him fast. By degrees (I have never seen it under ten or twelve
hours at least) some of the bristles outside, which have not touched the
fly, will turn inward and bring their sticky tip against the insect;
later still others and more external ones turn in, and so the fly is
bound by many liliputian bands. As it putrefies, I wonder if the leaf
merely takes its chance of getting some of the disengaged gases, or
whether it reabsorbs the clear fluid of the glands, charged now with
some animal matter.
In transplanting some Drosera into a pan with wet moss, the older leaves
may not work well; but the new ones developed soon will do better. Pray
experiment upon this and Dionæa. I wonder if there ever were series of
intermediate states between the inefficient Drosera, and the expert
Dionæa....
August 21.
... I inclose half a letter which came from Darwin this morning. I hope
you will go on with work on Dionæa....
C. DARWIN TO A. GRAY.
(Half of letter referred to above.)
DOWN, BROMLEY, KENT, August 8.
MY DEAR GRAY,--I have been glad to see Mr. Canby’s interesting letter on
Dionæa, and I thank you for sending it; but unfortunately the facts are
not new to me. Several years ago I observed the secretion of the
“gastric juices” and the close adhesion of the two sides of the leaf
when a fly was caught. I keep my notes in such an odd fashion that it
would take me some time to find them. I am almost sure I ascertained the
acid reaction of the secretion and its antiseptic power, but I cannot
remember whether in this, or in analogous cases, I found its subsequent
reabsorption. This letter fires me up to complete and publish on
Drosera, Dionæa, etc., but when I shall get time I know not. I am
working like a slave to complete my book.
TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.
July 6, 1867.
... Well, I have been free from much college work for ten days, and am
quite free after Wednesday morning.
I seem as well as possible, bright and clear, and should be content just
to visit my old mother and come right back to work on Californian
plants, which I have been looking at for a few days. But my wife says I
shall take four weeks, and on being weighed I find that my former
140-143 lbs. is reduced to 131.
So I must waste time and money in traveling, which I am reconciled to,
as Mrs. Gray needs it much.
From Oneida County, New York, I am going (with Mrs. G.) to drive into
northwest and central Pennsylvania and then visit a sister in Michigan.
Mrs. Gray insists that we must go to Chicago, which she wishes to see,
though I do not. I hate towns, especially new ones. Only think how near
I shall be to you!
So you saw old Bigelow, who is quite delighted with Shaw’s grounds, etc.
Torrey has just made me a little visit. Good, kind soul he is....
August 15.
We got home three days ago. Hot weather broke down my wife’s courage, as
I feared, and we went no farther west than Tecumseh, Michigan; made a
short visit to Sullivant at Columbus, then meandered through west and
north of Pennsylvania to central New York again, and hearing of Mrs.
Gray’s father’s illness came rapidly home....
I am very well; have put on three pounds’ weight.
We must go and see you and all the great West at some proper season,
spring or late fall....
I germinated for two years Nelumbium, but soon lose them. If you can,
send me some seeds this fall to try once more....
TO GEORGE BENTHAM.
October 14, 1867.
... Yes, I did receive your address,[70] read it hastily, and sent it to
“Silliman’s Journal” to be reprinted. It was too late for the September
number, but will be the leading article in the November number. I have
read a proof and am daily expecting a printed sheet, which I can send to
you, with one or two little remarks. I was exceedingly pleased with it;
so is Professor Henry. We both wondered how you could have so exactly
hit not one, but several nails on the head, as you have done. It will be
much read here, and will be truly useful.
You remind me that I ought to have criticised your working of Australian
Compositæ. The trouble is, that, except North American genera, these
things have long been quite out of my head. It will be unsafe for me to
approve or otherwise till I can get at work a little over them, which it
is not likely I can at present. I just fancy that in your dislike of
monotypic genera--which you abhor as nature does a vacuum--you may have
lumped up the angiantheous genera rather too much.
I am straining every nerve to get into a position to get at a synopsis
of North American plants, and my present work upon Bolander’s collection
is a part of the preparation. But I cannot lay the corner-stone till
college work is over, next July. Meanwhile I want suggestions as to
form, and how to condense references to the utmost and crowd a page, yet
leaving it clear and comely. When I have got the thing blocked out, and
have worked up a part, then Mrs. G. and I hope to go over and see you,
and to stay a good long while. Adieu, till next week.
Ever yours,
A. GRAY.
TO R. W. CHURCH.
December 5, 1867.
Before the year closes I mean you shall have a note from me, to renew on
my part an intercourse which has been interrupted through negligence of
mine. I find I get more and more overloaded as I grow older, and I dare
say you find it the same. Still we must exchange a word now and then.
I have to tell you of the severe loss we have had in the death, in
October, of Mrs. Gray’s good and kind father, Mr. Loring. He and my wife
were very much to each other, and in former years had been unusually
intimate companions; and his death at seventy-three, quite unexpected
till within a few weeks of the event, is very much felt. Mrs. Gray’s own
health, too, is but poor, though on the whole I trust it is becoming
firmer.
If you see your friend Mr. Fraser (whom I, unfortunately, did not) you
may learn from him what manner of man Mr. Loring was. I wish I knew him,
to say to him how highly we value a letter he lately addressed to Mrs.
Loring, and which I read yesterday,--so full of sympathy and just
appreciation.
Mr. Fraser, you may be sure, is very much thought of here.
I hope that Dr. Hooker, of Kew, has sent on to you the numbers of the
“Nation,” which I have for a year or more regularly posted to him,
originally requesting he should do so. But it is quite likely the busy
man has forgotten all about it.
For myself, I have passed my fifty-seventh anniversary, in firm health,
feeling my age only in a treacherous memory--as respects names, etc.,
not as to events or friends. The memory of our delightful visit to
Oxford is ever fresh.
TO CHARLES DARWIN.
February 24, 1868.
The other evening here I discoursed at our private club, by giving them
an abstract of the chapters on Inheritance and Pangenesis; the former
for Professor Bowen’s benefit. He and Agassiz took it all very well; and
pangenesis seemed to strike all of us as being as good an hypothesis as
one can now make....
On inside of leaf of Dionæa see the copious glands for secreting gastric
juice.
... I do not wonder at your book[71] being taken up at once, by the
great numbers of people who need and understand it, and the thousands
who jump at anything written by so notorious a writer as you are. The
“Origin” will sell anything; and I believe people will get more for
their money in this book than in even that, if they care for facts,
which generally they do not.
May 25.
I want to write you a long letter, but the time is not to be had now.
Many thanks for yours of May 8.
My notice of your book in the “Nation” was not intended to have anything
in it, except for the groundlings; was only to make the book known and
understood, a light affair.
My preface was written at the publishers’ request simply because yours
had not come. The fellows put in both. The edition is not very nicely
printed. Judging from the newspaper notices I think the book is taking
famously. That agricultural newspaper is taken by the hundred thousand
in the country. As to close of my article, to match close of your
book,--you see plainly I was put on the defense by your reference to an
old hazardous remark of mine. I found your stone-house argument
unanswerable in substance (for the notion of design must after all rest
mostly on faith, and on accumulation of adaptations, etc.); so all I
could do was to find a vulnerable spot in the shaping of it, fire my
little shot, and run away in the smoke.
Of course I understand your argument perfectly, and feel the weight of
it.
We were intensely amused at the Edinburgh man, who suggests that I could
easily smash you into little pieces! I wish he may live to see it done!
I am half dead with drudgery, half of it at least for other people; see
no relief but to break up, and run over, with wife, who needs a change,
to your side of the water for a good long while.
TO R. W. CHURCH.
June 22, 1868.
I have to send you--in a hasty line--my best thanks for remembering me
so kindly: 1. In your letter of January 17, which I am so tardy in
responding to.
2. The copy of Hooker edited by you, which I was pleased to have.
3. Your sermon at St. Mary’s, which Mrs. Gray and I both read with much
interest. I admired your handling of an important topic, and the solid
strength which comes from moderation of statement. It reminded me much
of one of our best sermonizers here, who, though a good deal heterodox
(I am sorry to say), treats such subjects more impressively than any one
else and much in that way, his guarded understatements or concessions
telling heavily in the argument.
I read and think of nothing but botany of late, having been too hard
pressed for a long while. But last Sunday I read with interest the
latter part of Mr. Gladstone’s essay on “Ecce Homo.”
There is something which seems to me very admirable and attachable about
Gladstone. I wonder if his church friends and supporters will mostly
drop him at the coming struggle, for his action looking to the
disestablishment of the Irish church.
But the gist of my present note is to say, that I have got a year’s
leave of absence, and Mrs. Gray and I expect to cross over to England in
two months.
I find I must break up a set of engagements and of work, mainly for
others, which absorbs too much of my time, and Mrs. Gray’s health makes
me anxious to avoid another winter here, at present. The change will be
good for us both. We mean to pass the whole autumn in England, mostly at
Kew, and most of the winter in Italy and perhaps Egypt, where Mrs.
Loring, now on the Continent (tell Mr. Fraser), expects to be, and we
may be able to join the party, in a climate which may be advantageous
after such a winter as our last.
Very sincerely yours,
ASA GRAY.