35 i Asa Gray: His Life and Work. 



discover the first dawning of scientific ideas, and to follow them 

 as they develoj^ed into comprehensive theories. Bnt the task is a 

 very difficult one, for it is only with great labor that the historian 

 of Botany succeeds in picking the real thread of scientific thought 

 out of an incredible chaos of empirical material. It has always 

 been the chief hindrance to a rapid advance in Botany that the 

 majority of writers sinaply collected facts, or if they attempted 

 to apply them to theoretical purposes, did so very imperfectly. I 

 have therefore singled out those men as the true heroes of science, 

 of our story, who not only established new facts, but made a 

 speculative use of empirical material"; and he describes this 

 speculative process in gifted minds as " an ever-deepening insight 

 into the relationship of all plants to one another; into their outer 

 form and inner organization, and into the physiological processes 

 dependent on these conditions." 



Prof. Gray's original work proves him to have been one of these 

 true heroes of the botanical story. He was a scientific theorizer. 

 He coidd make a speculative use of facts. He was a deep thinker 

 seeking always for the most comprehensive points of view. For 

 instance, Mrs. Tieat says that his most remarkable contribution 

 to science was a paper prepared in 1859 upon the "Diagnostic 

 characters of certain new species of plants collected in Japan by 

 Charles Wright; with observations upon the relations of the 

 Japanese Flora to that of J^orth America and other parts of the 

 northern temperate zone." "This paper," slie says, "at once 

 raised him to the very highest rank among philosophical natural- 

 ists, and attracted to him the attention of the whole scientific 

 world." 



Here, certainly, was very different work from that required in 

 making text-books and teaching college students. It called into 

 action his highest powers. He was dealing with the relationships 

 of widely separated patches of our North American Flora and 

 the Flora of eastern Asia, between which he had discovered an 

 unaccountable likeness. And then he also found a likeness 

 between these existing Floras and that of the Tertiary epoch. 

 Think of the vast stores of accurate knowledge recjuired to 

 establish these relationships ! But the man of imaginaticm does 

 not stop with the facts. The why and the how are ever pressing 

 for answers, and here comes in the scientific imagination. Mrs, 

 Treat says: "He explained the peculiar distribution of plants 

 through the Northern liemisphere by tracing their descent through 

 geological periods from common ancestors that llourished in the 

 Tertiary epoch in higli latitudes." And this was done before 

 Darwin. No wonder that men of science abroad were impatient 

 at the sight of this mental giant grinding in the class-room and 

 spending his pre(;ious leisure in editorial drudgery or the manu- 

 facture of text-books, however perfect. 



There is another aspect of the situation which makes it seem 

 still more aggravating. This man's work had been accumulating 

 for a hundred years. Not only had hS come to an unexplored 

 continent, but the i)rinciples by which its Flora could be naturally 

 classed were not established until his time; and he had an 

 im])ortant hand in their estnlilislmicnt. From tlie time of 

 Linnieus, thinking Botanists had been bewildered and defeated 



