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67 



We 



profounder minds to establish, if they can, a rational distinction 

 in kind, between his (the Creative Mind) working in Nature, 

 carrying on operations, and in initiating those operations." 



September 5, 1857, Dr. Gray received a letter from Darwin, 

 explaining briefly his theory of Natural Selection, so that he 

 must have been seriously considering these views before the pub- 

 hcation of the Origin of Species. Darwin, in a letter to A. R. 

 Wallace, dated May 18, i860, says of this work, "Asa Gray 

 fights like a hero in defence," while Francis Darwin, in the Life 

 and Letters of Chas. Darwin, London, 1887, says, "Asa Gray 

 fought the battle splendidly in the United States." His various 

 essays and reviews pertaining to Darwinism were collected and 

 published in 1876, in a book entitled Darwmiana, and include 

 papers from the American Journal, Atlantic Monthly, The 

 Nation, Nature, New York Tribune, a paper on Evolutionary 

 Teleology, and a paper on Sequoia and its History; the Relations 



of North American to Northeastern Asian and to Tertiary Vege- 

 tation, read before the American Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science, at Dubuque, Iowa, August, 1872, on the occa- 

 sion of his retiring from the Presidency. In this able paper, he 

 explains the isolation of these ^iant trees on the theory of the 

 Survival of the Fittest, and refers back to past geologic times, 

 when Sequoias played a more important part on the surface of 

 our globe. To show how Dr. Gray's mind was stored with 

 information ready to be called into use at any moment, he said, 

 on presenting a printed copy to the writer, that he wrote it in 

 e cars while on his way from California to Dubuque. 

 In 1873 Dr. Gray was relieved from active duties in the col- 

 lege, beyond the care of the herbarium, while retaining his pro- 

 fessorship, and enabled to devote much more of his time to his 

 literary work. And now he began the continuance of the old 



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Torrey and Gray Flora, but on quite a different plan. Over 

 thirty years had passed since the last volume of the Flora was 

 published and, during that time, a rich fund for the prosecution 

 of the work had accumulated, in the shape of the many valuable 

 botanical contributions written by Dr. Gray and others, and the 

 richly- stored herbarium at Cambridge. The old Flora being 



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