ASA GRAY 229 



on, was spent over The Monastery, which he had been planning 

 to read on his homeward voyage in 1887." 



Gray was of Irish ancestry, his great-great-grandfather having 

 emigrated from Ireland to Massachusetts as a member of a Scotch- 

 Irish colony composed of rigid Presbyterians, who desired to 

 leave Ireland to escape various persecutions. This religious inheri- 

 tance had not faded out when it reached Gray, and although to 

 some at the time he seemed far from orthodox in his champion- 

 ship of Darwin, he was always a theistic evolutionist. In the 

 preface to Darwiniana he makes the following distinct statement 

 of his religious views: 



"As to the natural theological questions which are here through- 

 out brought into what most naturalists, and some other readers, 

 may deem undue prominence, there are many who may be in- 

 terested to know how these increasingly prevalent views and their 

 tendencies are regarded by one who is scientifically, and in his 

 own fashion, a Darwinian, philosophically a convinced theist, and 

 religiously an acceptor of the ' creed commonly called the Nicene,' 

 as the exponent of the Christian faith." 



A glimpse of the man and the estimate of him by his colleagues 

 may be obtained from an extract taken from a letter written by 

 his friend Dean Church to Mrs. Gray. 



"There is a special cachet in all Dr. Gray's papers, great and 

 small, which is his own, and which seems to me to distinguish 

 him from even his more famous contemporaries. There is the 

 scientific spirit in it, but firm, imaginative, fearless, cautious, with 

 large horizons, and very attentive and careful to objections and 

 qualifications; and there is besides, what is so often wanting in 

 scientific writing, ^ fry.?" spirit, always remembering that, 

 besides facts and laws, there are souls and characters over against 

 them, of as great account as they, in whose mirrors they are re- 

 flected, whom they excite and delight, and without whose interest 

 they would be blanks. The combination comes out in his great 

 generalizations, in the bold and yet considerate way in which he 

 deals with Darwin's ideas, and in the notices of so many of his 

 scientific friends, whom we feel that he was interested in as men, 

 and not only as scientific inquirers. The sweetness and charity, 

 which we remember so well in living converse, is always on the 



