CHAPTER VI.

LETTERS TO DARWIN AND OTHERS.

1860-1868.

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

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

TO J. D. HOOKER.

CAMBRIDGE, January 5, 1860.

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

CAMBRIDGE, January 23, 1860.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enough for the present.

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

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

Ever yours,
ASA GRAY.

TO CHARLES L. BRACE.

1861 (?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CAMBRIDGE, June 17, 1862.

DEAR BRACE,–Thanks for the “World.” Who wield its destinies?

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

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

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

Ever thine,
A. GRAY.

CAMBRIDGE, April 22, 1862 (?)

DEAR BRACE,–You are very welcome to such casual criticism as I can
offer on your two pages of manuscript.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ever yours cordially,
ASA GRAY.

CAMBRIDGE, July 6, 1863.

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

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

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

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

But there is no use writing at random.

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

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

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

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

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

Ever yours,
A. GRAY.

TO R. W. CHURCH.

May 7, 1861.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours most cordially,
ASA GRAY.

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

January 25, 1861.

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 25, 1861.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CAMBRIDGE, August 6, 1861.

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 27.

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

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

November 11.

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

God save the Union, and confusion to all traitors.

TO DANIEL CADY EATON.

CAMBRIDGE, October 4, 1861.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

CAMBRIDGE, January 15, 1862.

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

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

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

February 20.

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

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

May 22.

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

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

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

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

Ever your most peaceful friend,

ASA GRAY.

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

CAMBRIDGE, October 10, 1860.

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

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

January (?), 1862.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, enough of this.

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

February 18, 1862.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 6.

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

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

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

Ever yours, cordially,
ASA GRAY.

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

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

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

March 31.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A. GRAY.

May 18.

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

CAMBRIDGE, April 26, 1861.

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

Ever, dear De Candolle, yours most cordially,

ASA GRAY.

December 16.

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

July 2, 1862.

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

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

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

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

TO CHARLES WRIGHT.

CAMBRIDGE, April 17, 1862.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 1.

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

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

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

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

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

July 2, 1862.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enough for to-day.

PROVIDENCE, R. I., July 29, 1862.

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

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

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

CAMBRIDGE, September 22, 1862.

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

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

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

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

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

October 4, 1862.

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

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

October 13.

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

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

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

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

CAMBRIDGE, November 10, 1862.

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

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

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

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

It does seem that all England wishes us to be weak and divided; perhaps
that is good national policy. But the more that is so, the more
necessary it is for us to vindicate our integrity, at whatever cost. Let
us have it out now, even at the cost of ten times what it has cost so
far.

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

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

Ever yours cordially,
ASA GRAY.

November 24.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

CAMBRIDGE, 14th October, 1862.

DEAR ENGELMANN,–Never mind turmoil. It will come out right. I go
against the abolition wing, but support the President in his
Proclamation.

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

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

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

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

TO CHARLES WRIGHT.

October 13, 1862.

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

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

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

November 14.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

January 27, 1863.

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

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

In reply to your question:–

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

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

Ever your attached friend,
A. GRAY.

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

CAMBRIDGE, February 16, 1863.

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO W. J. HOOKER.

CAMBRIDGE, March 16, 1863.

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

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

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

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

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

April 28, 1863.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ever, dear Sir William, yours affectionately,

ASA GRAY.

TO MRS. THOMAS P. JAMES.

CAMBRIDGE, April 30, 1863.

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

CAMBRIDGE, March 22, 1863.

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

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

March 23.

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

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

April 11.

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

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

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

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

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

April 20.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 26.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ever your affectionate,
A. GRAY.

June, [1863].

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

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

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

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

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

July 7.

My last from you is May 31.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now for my best thing for to-day.

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

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

I am waiting for Gymnadenia tridentata to come on.

But the post hour has come.

July 21.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enough; good-bye.
A. G.

September 1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 23.

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

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

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

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

CAMBRIDGE, December 11, 1863.

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

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

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

May 3, [1864].

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

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

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

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

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

Wright is coming home for a few months this summer.

TO CHARLES WRIGHT.

CAMBRIDGE, September 18, 1863.

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

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

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

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

December 1.

Things move on.

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

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

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

Merry Christmas to you.

January 21, 1864.

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

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

TO R. W. CHURCH.

CAMBRIDGE, December 25, 1863.

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

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

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

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

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

Very sincerely yours,
ASA GRAY.

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

CAMBRIDGE, December 22, 1863.

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

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

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

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

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

A. GRAY.

TO JAMES D. DANA.

CAMBRIDGE, January 20, [1864].

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

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

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

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

The other course has greatly jargonified zoölogy.

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

But I dare say most would agree with you.

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

Ever yours,
A. GRAY.

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

February 16, 1864.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours cordially,
ASA GRAY.

TO R. W. CHURCH.

CAMBRIDGE, April 4, 1864.

MY DEAR MR. CHURCH,–If you have long ago written your American
correspondent off your books, as being a right shabby fellow, he could
not complain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ever yours most sincerely,
ASA GRAY.

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

CAMBRIDGE, May 30, 1864.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ever yours,
ASA GRAY.

CAMBRIDGE, January 30, 1865.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A. GRAY.

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

February 14, 1865.

… Wright is here, distributing and finishing up his North Pacific
Expedition Collection; … will return to Cuba in a month or two, to
take a year or two more there, revisit some old parts and explore some
new; then I urge Hayti, but Wright seems rather loth.

Rothrock–from northwestern Pennsylvania–is a bright lively pupil of
mine for last three or four years, when not serving his country in the
army, where he has done good service as private in infantry, and as
captain in Pennsylvania cavalry, etc. He had to leave his thesis partly
unfinished. But the real credit of all belongs to him. His father is M.
D., and he is now studying medicine, attending lectures at Philadelphia.
But botany is in him, and will probably come out….

There, I believe this is about all. J. A. Lowell has made a nice present
of costly botanical books, of which more anon.

[March 18.]

… Rothrock is going with Kinnicut this week, to Northwestern America,
Norton’s Sound, etc., to explore on telegraph route close along the
Arctic Circle. Any pines there you want?…

March 29.

… No, Mrs. Gray did not go to inauguration ball. But she has had a
good time. Her brother, the general, took her from Fortress Monroe,
where she went, up to the front and close to rebel lines; where she had
the honor of having a rebel shell thrown at her!

I expect her home again to-morrow.

No, I don’t get a curator, and I want one sadly. Yet it is as well
Fendler did not come, as it might have been difficult for me to pay him.
He, however, is just the man I want here, to take charge of herbarium
and garden….

TO W. J. HOOKER.

CAMBRIDGE, April 24, 1865.

Mr. Wright is about to return to Cuba, to have one year more of
exploration there, and especially to visit Turquino, the highest
mountain of the island, and some other parts which are still promising.

He will now be able–as he is always most ready–to attend to the
gathering of seeds of palms, or other seeds, or things you may want at
Kew. He has now some good and kind friends in the country, and deserves
them, for he is one of the most hearty, single-minded, and disinterested
persons I ever knew, as well as an admirable collector; but being rather
rough in exterior, he does not like to come into contact with official
people, unless properly accredited. But if armed with official
instructions to British consuls, etc., and so having the means of very
promptly turning over, without bother or uncertainty, whatever he may
collect for you, I have no doubt you may turn him to excellent account.
Perhaps, however, he will not long remain in Cuba; for there is a
prospect of getting him attached (nominally, without any emolument) to
the United States consulate-general at Hayti, so that he may explore the
botany of that island, as he has done that of Cuba. But I doubt if he
will keep in the field many years more, or do such hard work as he has
done in former years. I wish him to explore Hayti, however, and then
associate himself with Grisebach in the production of a Flora Antillana,
or at least a Flora Cubensis, if Grisebach inclines to work longer at
West Indian botany, after having finished the critical enumeration of
Cuban plants (founded mainly on Wright’s collections) which he is now
occupied with….

It seems like old times to be writing to you. We have the less occasion
for direct correspondence of late years, owing to my having such a
capital correspondent, as well as a capital friend, in Joseph. I know
not how I could get on without him. I look with great satisfaction upon
his splendid scientific career, and feel that you must take great pride
in it. I rejoice to hear that you are so well and hearty, and at work
with vigor, comfort, and success upon the “Synopsis Filicum.”

Dr. Brewer[59] sends his regards. He goes this week to New Haven (Yale
College), to attend to the opening of his work as professor of
agriculture. I was running over his collections, naming and
characterizing the new things, and laying out a set for you of all you
could wish. But since spring opened, my college work has been so
pressing that all else has been interrupted, perhaps will be in abeyance
till near midsummer.

I must not fail to tell you that our good friend Dr. Torrey sailed
yesterday for California! via the Isthmus, to return three or four
months hence, perhaps overland.

He is a much trusted officer of government, as assayer of the United
States assay office at New York, and the secretary of the treasury,
knowing that he needs some respite and change, has arranged this trip
for him, upon business of the department, by no means of an onerous
character.

He has long wished to set eyes upon California, and I am glad he has
such a pleasant opportunity of doing so.

TO R. W. CHURCH.

May 1, 1865.

I have long wished to communicate with you, but it is long since I have
written any but pressing letters; a large and ever-increasing scientific
correspondence and various business matters absorbing all my leisure and
powers, as the times and events also absorb our thoughts. You can
imagine how deeply we have felt, rejoiced, and suffered during the last
month or so.

Well, “treason has done its worst,” and rebellion, as an organized
power, is essentially brought to an end. Slavery is done away, and we
have now the task of establishing a new and better order of things at
the South, of replacing barbarous by civilized and free institutions. A
heavy task, no doubt; but the good Providence that has so wonderfully
shaped our ways and sustained us thus far, we humbly and confidently
rely on to carry our dear country through all its trials.

I doubt if you will have in England a full conception of the profound
impression which this last atrocious crime has made,[60] filling the
whole land with the deepest and tenderest grief, like that of a personal
bereavement; inexpressibly shocking, but never for a moment bewildering
the country nor deranging the action of the government. The manner in
which both our victories and sorrows have affected the country is most
hopeful, and promises the best results. There is much yet to do and to
suffer, and there is need of wisdom, patience, and sacrifice in the
renovation of our country, and the establishment of free institutions
throughout the South, involving as it does the complete reconstruction
of society there. But under God’s blessing, we expect full success in
due time.

As to myself, I can say little now. I am quite overworked at this
season, but I hope that hereafter a rearrangement of my work in the
university may bring some relief.

I am beginning to enjoy the advantage and comfort of the establishment
of my herbarium, and the building quite meets my expectations. The
collections are fast increasing; faster than I can take care of them,
through the bounty of my scientific correspondents; while Mr. Lowell’s
donation of botanical books is of the value of about £300.

November 16, 1865.

Now do not be startled at a letter from me written the very evening of
the day in which arrived your pleasant favor of the 1st inst. For to-day
I also received the inclosed official letter, which has been lying, I
suppose, for want of your address. And so I send it forward at once.

In fact, the fund raised for the support of the herbarium (nearly
$11,000) has been till very lately retained in the hands of the
gentleman who took charge of raising it, in the form of a good
investment, and is now at length made over to the corporation of the
university in trust. Your £5 I turned in at the time when exchange was
at the highest (i. e., our currency most depreciated), so it figures as
fifty dollars,–quite a sum,–and for it, as for the rest of the
capital, we get, up to 1881, six per cent per annum in gold, if the
United States government lasts. And we now feel confident enough of
that.

Your letters are always very pleasant to us, and that of to-day is very
gratifying.

Yes, we, too, should not have said this was the way in which we would
have had slavery destroyed,–by no means. We wished it by a slow process
which would have cost no life, injured no property, but benefited all as
it went on. But our misguided Southern brethren would have it otherwise,
and so it was. And it is something to be glad of, after all, that it was
done in our day, and we think thoroughly. I take a weekly newspaper, the
“Nation,” which is on the plan of the “Spectator” and the “Saturday
Review,” etc., but we have few good paragraph-writers, and our best
writers will not write. But this paper may interest you, at least in the
letters of its correspondent traveling in the South. I post some
numbers to your address, and I will send some more if you care to see
them. Otherwise the numbers are thrown aside, for I do not keep them.

Even here we have the same sort of liking for Palmerston which the mass
of English have, and no better reason to give for it; and we look with a
sort of fascinated interest upon Gladstone, and expect to see him
premier before long, in a year or two, and we wonder how he will get on
in so critical a position as he will be in. Goldwin Smith I met, but saw
not very much of. He was in very delicate health. Fraser I did not see,
though he was my father-in-law’s guest, and was very much liked by all.
Both had troops of friends. Mrs. Gray and I were in the country when
Fraser was at Mr. Loring’s house on the shore.

The short space left on my sheet must be all devoted to an earnest
exhortation for you to follow your two friends’ example. Come over and
see us, and make our quiet house your home, from which you can travel as
much as you like and see the country in this interesting phase. Pray
think of it seriously. The expense need not be great.

Mrs. Gray, with kindest remembrances, seconds my request, and wishes it
extended to Mrs. Church.

Cordially yours,
ASA GRAY.

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

May 15, 1865.

Your kind letter of the 19th ult. crossed a brief note from me. I am too
much distracted with work at this season to write letters on our
affairs, and if I once begin, I should not know where to stop. You have
always been sympathizing and just, and I appreciate your hearty
congratulations on the success of our just endeavors. You have since had
much more to rejoice over, as well as to sorrow with us. But the noble
manner in which our country has borne itself should give you real
satisfaction. We appreciate, too, the good feeling of England in its
hearty grief at the murder of Lincoln.

Don’t talk about our “hating” you, nor suppose that we want to rob you
of Canada, for which nobody cares.

We think we have been ill-used by you, when you thought us weak and
broken, and when we expected better things. We have learned that we must
be strong to live in peace and comfort with England, otherwise we should
have to eat much dirt. But now that we are on our feet again, all will
go well, and hatred will disappear. Indeed I see little of that.

I must look to the Plantago dimorphism, for, as you say, these plants,
fertilized by the wind, would gain nothing by being dimorphic. No
dimorphic species grows very near here, nor can I now get seeds of P.
Virginica. Perhaps a good look at even dried specimens, under your
hints, may settle the matter.

I was exceedingly interested with the Lythrum paper (but had no time to
write a notice of it), and I wait expectingly for your Climbing plants.
You are the very prince of investigators. We hope presently to make Mrs.
Wedgewood’s acquaintance.

July 24.

I am reading in snatches your admirable paper on Climbing plants,–as
yet only eighty-eight pages of it, and am watching with great interest
all the climbers I have at hand. What a nice piece of work you have made
of it!

I see you explain and illustrate at length the double turn of a caught
tendril. Is it not enough to say that, with both ends fixed, if it
shortens, say by the contraction of one side, it must by mechanical
necessity turn its coil different ways from a neutral point?

Ere this, Mrs. Wedgewood should be back from Canada, but I have not yet
learned that she is so. She was to let me know, and we would have a day
on the shore, where Mr. Loring lives in summer,–a pretty bit of
country. But it is now too late.

I wish she could have been here on Friday, when we welcomed back our
Harvard men who had been in the war,–over five hundred of them,–and
remembered those who had died for their country. What a day we had!

Jefferson Davis richly deserves to be hanged. We are willing to leave
the case in the hands of the government, who must take the
responsibility. If I were responsible, I would have him tried for
treason (the worst of crimes in a republic), convicted, sentenced to
death; and then I think I should commute the penalty, not out of any
consideration for him, but from policy, and for his more complete
humiliation. The only letters I have received expressing a desire to
hang him are from rebeldom itself,–from Alabama. You see slavery is
dead, dead,–an absolute unanimity as to this. The revolted States will
behave as badly as they can, but they are so thoroughly whipped that
they can’t stir, hand or foot, and we are disbanding all our armies,–a
corporal’s guard is enough to hold South Carolina. Seriously, there are
difficult questions before us, but only one result is possible: the
South must be renovated, and Yankeefied.

Well, take good care of yourself, and let me know that you are again in
comfortable condition.

November 6.

I am very glad to hear from you, and to see half your letter of October
19 in your own handwriting is a good sign. I do hope you may get a
comfortable winter, and bring out your next volume without breaking
down.

I am pleased that you approve my abstract of your Climber paper, but
observe it was only of the first part of your elaborate article. But as
to the praise you speak of, I am sure you pay me back with interest.

I lately sent “Silliman” as much more–a large part, indeed, extracts,
which I could not shorten–on the Tendril-bearing part of your paper.
But Dana sent me the proof, with all my long extracts omitted for want
of room. This reduced my article to incoherence, so I begged all to be
laid over for the January number, when I hope to have room. I
entertained our social scientific club here with your article, and all
were greatly interested.

As to climbing roses, they are the strong summer shoots, growing after
flowering, which I find frequently running their heads into dark corners
of the porch over my door, etc.

That is very curious, but quite what I looked for, that dimorphous
species self-fertilized should act like hybrids (sterile or dwarf,
etc.).

You must publish these facts in some brief article.

“Stephens” (Stevens) was a New Yorker; is dead, years ago; wrote most
amusing and popular travels; in Egypt, as well. Central America was his
first and freshest book, but only amusing, as far as I recollect.

So Palmerston is gone. A fine specimen of a John Bull he was, a very
typical specimen. We Yankees can’t help admiring and liking him, though
not for any good he ever did us. But as for his successor, he is a prig,
a juiceless stick.

Don’t you think Adams pays him back nicely for proposing that they
should sit down and rejoice together over the abolition of slavery? Just
see how the world has moved. Turn back to Russell’s _lecture_ to be read
to Mr. Lincoln on occasion of his proclamation of emancipation!

Good-by, my dear, good fellow, and recover health as fast as ever you
can.

Yours affectionately,
A. GRAY.

TO CHARLES WRIGHT.

CAMBRIDGE, June 28, 1865.

I am not going on so any more. A letter from me you shall have. To be
sure I have had none from you since you sailed, but that is no matter.
College and garden and herbarium work together are enough to drive one
mad; but now the college work begins to hold up, and will soon be over.
And as to herbarium, Fendler has at length promised to come at the end
of the summer and help me–all winter at least, perhaps longer….

Oh, yes! I have yours of “Habana,” May 9th, with your shipboard studies
on the variations of Chapman and Grisebach. Well, sometimes one wrong,
sometimes the other; sometimes a difference as to who the author of a
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.