362 Asa Gra>j : His Life and Work. 



"I have come to the heterodox conchision that there are no 

 such things as independently cieated species, that species are only 

 strongly defined varieties. ... I assume that species arise like 

 our domestic varieties with much extinction." 



This is the first word ever known to have been penned in this 

 world on the now well-known principle of "survival of the 

 fittest." 



While Gray treated this doctrine fairly from the first, it was 

 not to be expected that he would immediately give adherence 

 thereto. His friends, Agassiz and Dana, bitterly opposed it, 

 while he held his mind in the true scientific attitude of suspended 

 judgment. His heart from the first told him there must be 

 something in it. In 1880 he had so far transcended his scruples 

 that at New Haven he publicly said : "Natural selection by itself 

 is not a hypothesis nor even a theory. It is a truth, a catena of 

 facts and direct inferences from facts." It is a sad pity that he 

 did not live to complete some of the work he had begun. The 

 "Synoptic Flora" lies incomplete, to the sorrow of many a 

 botanist 



At the banquet on his seventy-fifth birthday, when the silver 

 vase was presented to him, every botanist in America felt that, 

 like the great Rocky Mountain peak bearing his name, here was 

 one who transcended them all in the knowledge of their favorite 

 Science. It was then Lowell wrote of him : 



"Just fatel prolong his life, well spent, 

 Whose indefatigable hours 

 Have been as gaily innocent 

 And fragrant as his flowers." 



