ASA GRAY 221 



of Professor Gray in the class-room has been given than that by 

 Dr. Farlow, first his pupil and afterwards his colleague at Harvard 

 University. His first impressions are recorded as follows: 



"I expected to find an elderly and rather austere man; but I 

 found a young-looking man, with strikingly bright and expressive 

 eyes, quick in all his motions, and so thoroughly in earnest and 

 absorbed in his subject that he assumed that all his hearers must 

 be equally interested. There was an air of simplicity and straight- 

 forwardness, without a trace of conscious superiority or pedantic 

 manner, He was always young in spirit and his enthusiasm was 

 contagious." 



He was a great teacher, not in the sense of exacting a rigid 

 discipline, but in the far better sense of transforming interest into 

 enthusiasm. Nor did he coddle interest, but trained it, often se- 

 verely. The writer very distinctly remembers submitting to him a 

 piece of work that must have been callow in the extreme, but which 

 seemed to its author fairly creditable. Glancing through it with 

 characteristic quickness, Gray sat down and took a half hour out 

 of an extremely busy day in performing a most searching and re- 

 lentless piece of dissection. As the flimsy fabric was torn to tatters, 

 the victim felt all the sinking of heart and discouragement that 

 must come to a man convinced that he is a complete failure. After- 

 wards he discovered that the operation was not to destroy but to 

 train, and the lesson was never forgotten. It brought a perspective 

 that no amount of coddling could have done. Another phase of 

 Gray's teaching, and one far too much neglected by scientific men, 

 is well brought out by an incident in the experience of Dr. J. T. 

 Rothrock, who says: 



"It was not sufficient that the conclusions should be correct, 

 but they must be stated in exactly the right way. An artistic turn 

 of a sentence, making it graceful as well as logical, was in his 

 eyes of the utmost importance. 'There now, that is neatly stated,' 

 is an expression which yet rings in my ears. It was uttered by 

 Dr. Gray, when at last I had succeeded in 'putting a point' as he 

 thought it should be. I had written my first scientific paper at 

 least six times, and each time thought it was as well done as could 

 be; certainly as well done as I was capable of doing it. But my 



