ASA GRAY 173 



work at the Flora until spring. But I will find 

 time to study and revise any sets of Lindheimer's, 



Geyer's and Liider's plants you send As 



to my paper on Ceratophyllaceae, I have long 

 since wished it unpublished, as it contains mis- 

 taken views." 



His life at this time was very full, and friends 

 laughingly recall his alertness, mental and physi- 

 cal. " In the street he was usually on a half-run. 

 .... When travelling by coach and climbing 

 a hill, he would sometimes alarm his fellow- 

 travellers by suddenly disappearing through a 

 window, in his eagerness to secure some plant 

 he had spied. He was quick and impetuous in 

 temper, but his prevailing spirit was one of 

 apparently inexhaustible good nature." Prof. 

 J. K. Hosmer says: " On an autumn day, in the 

 early fifties, as I loitered in the greenhouse of the 

 Botanic Garden at Cambridge, a lithe, bare- 

 headed man, in rough brown attire, quickly 

 stepped in from the flower-beds outside. He was 

 in his fullest vigor, his hair smooth, his dark 

 eyes full of animation. It was a noticeably vivid 

 and alert personality; and as he tossed onto a 

 working-table a heavy sheaf of long-stemmed 

 plants, wet from a recent shower, and bent over 

 them in sharp scrutiny, I became aware I was in 

 the presence of Asa Gray, the first of American 

 botanists. He had come as a boy from a remote 



