Asa Gray: His Life and Work. 345 



cal naturalists, and attracted to him the attention of the whole 

 scientific world. In tliis paper he first points ont tlie similarity 

 between the floras of Eastern North America and Japan, a fact 

 he had long svispected, and then explains the peculiar distribution 

 of plants through the Northern Hemisphere, by tracing their 

 direct descent through geological periods from ancestors whicli 

 flourished when there was a tertiary vegetation. This tlieory of 

 geographical distribution, now generally adopted by all naturalists, 

 was further elaborated in his lecture upon "Sequoia and its 

 History," delivered in 1872 before the American Associaticm for 

 tlie Advancement of Science, and still later in a lecture entitled 

 "Forest Geography and Archteology," delivered in 1878 before 

 the Harvard Natural History Society. 



These studies of the flora of Japan had doubtless greatly mod- 

 ified Professor Gray's opinion upon the origin of species, a subject 

 which was just then beginning to deeply interest the intellectual 

 world. He, like the younger De Candolle and Hooker, was now 

 ready to admit the doctrine of the local origin of vegetable 

 species, and to discard the hypothesis of a double or multiple 

 origin, at that time and long afterward adhered to by many 

 botanists. That is, he believed that two similar or closely allied 

 species of plants, the one, for example, growing in New England 

 and the other in Japan, were descended from one common 

 although remote ancestor, and that they were not, as Schouw and 

 Agassiz insisted, created separately and independently in the 

 I'egions where they now exist. 



Dr. Gray more than any other man in America lias made 

 the doctrine of Evolution what it is to-day ; and he has 

 made Darwin better understood and appreciated than all 

 other writers combined. And yet he did not wholly agree 

 w^th Darwin in some particulars. In a letter to Dr. Gray, 

 INIr. Darwin says, " I grieve to say that I cannot go as far 

 as you do about design. I cannot think the "world as we see 

 it is the result of chance, and yet I cannot look at each 

 separate thing as the result of design." But Dr. Gray was 

 so deeply grounded in the Christian faith that nothing 

 could swerve him. He believed that the Darwinian theory 

 of the origin of species was entirely reconcilable with the 

 conception of a Divine Power governing the universe. He 

 believed "that each variation has been specially ordained 

 or led along a beneficial line." 



In the closing paragraph of an address delivered before 

 the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 

 in 1872, on " Sequoia and its History," he touches the key- 

 note of his religious belief. After quoting Miss Frances 

 Power Cobbe's regrets that we no sooner find out how any- 

 thing is done, than our first thought is that God did not do 



