December 27, 1893.] 



Garden and Forest. 



539 



boilers, although some of these houses are at least five hundred 

 feet away. No one can make even a casual inspection of this 

 establishment without being impressed with the simplicity, 

 effectiveness and economy in production with uniformity and 

 excellence of product, which are secured by thorough organ- 

 ization and system in the conduct of a business of this magni- 

 tude. „ 



New York. '-'• 



Recent Publications. 



Letters of Asa Gray. Edited by Jane Loring Gray. Two 

 volumes. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston and New York. 

 1893. 



These volumes show much of the life and character of 

 an interesting and most distinguished American of strong 

 personality and very considerable achievement, and inci- 

 dentally contain a large amount of information with regard 

 to the personal traits of the principal botanists of the past 

 generation, with whom the author of these letters main- 

 tained a long and active correspondence. The letters 

 themselves, to which a short autobiographical sketch is 

 added, are allowed to tell the story of Dr. Gray's life, the 

 editor wisely restricting her labors to supplementing them 

 with such explanatory notes and brief paragraphs as were 

 necessary to make the narrative clear. 



Asa Gray was born on November i8th, 18 10, in Sauquoit, 

 a hamlet in Oneida County, in this state. His father was 

 a farmer, great-grandson of John Gray, who emigrated 

 with a colony of Presbyterians from Londonderry, in Ire- 

 land, to Boston, Massachusetts, in 171 8, and established 

 himself in Worcester, in that state. Moses Wiley Gray, 

 the grandson of John Gray and the grandfather of the 

 future botanist, moved to Oneida County in 1794, settling 

 in Sauquoit. His son, Moses Gray, married, in 1809, Roxana 

 Howard, of a Massachusetts family, and shortly after the 

 birth of his eldest son, Asa, moved to Paris Furnace, where 

 he established a small tannery. Here Asa Gray, when only 

 four years old, performed his first labor, which consisted in 

 riding round the ring the horse which turned the bark-mill, 

 and here he received his first schooling in the district school, 

 where he early attracted attention for his proficiency in 

 spelling, for which he won a number of medals. The 

 brightness of the boy and his fondness for books induced 

 his father to send him to the Clinton Grammar School, 

 where he learned the rudiments of Latin and Greek, and 

 then to the Fairfield Academy, in Herkimer County, which 

 he entered at the age of fifteen. It was intended that he 

 should go to college, but instead he began, in 1826, the 

 study of medicine in Fairfield Academy, and was fortunate 

 in securing the friendship of Professor James Hadley, who 

 became his earliest scientific adviser. Two years later saw 

 the dawn of his interest in botany and his first collection of 

 plants made during his drives about the country with his 

 principal. Dr. Trowbridge, of Bridgeport, whom he assisted 

 during that part of the year when the medical school was 

 not in session. About this time, at the suggestion of Pro- 

 fessor Hadley, Dr. Gray opened a correspondence with 

 Dr. Lewis C. Peck, of Albany, who was then the principal 

 botanist of northern New York, and not much later he sent 

 some rare plants to Dr. John Torrey. This was the first 

 step in an intimacy which made Gray, whose first taste had 

 been for geology, a botanist, and which lasted, without in- 

 terruption, until the death of the elder of the two friends. 



We have dwelt at some length upon the early life and 

 training of Asa Gray because in view of his scanty oppor- 

 tunities his future achievements and distinction are remark- 

 able. The great naturalists of his generation with whom 

 we most often associate the name of Asa Gray, Darwin, 

 the second Candolle, the younger Hooker, Bentham and 

 Agassiz, were either the sons of great naturalists, carefully 

 trained from boyhood to become themselves naturalists, or 

 of men of education and culture, who were able to offer 

 their sons the best opportunites for the development of 

 their different tastes. That the son of a hard-working New 

 York farmer, with no evidence of intellectual inheritance 



could by sheer force of hard work raise himself to the po- 

 sition he achieved, argues great powers and furnishes a 

 striking and conspicuous proof of the value of our Ameri- 

 can form of social organization for the growth of intellec- 

 tual character. It is possible that a poor farmer's boy with 

 no friends or means, except those which he was able to 

 conquer for himself, might have risen in some other coun- 

 try than the United States to the postion and influence held 

 by Asa Gray at the time of his death, but it is hardly possible. 



In the bright and active young botanist of Oneida 

 County Dr. Torrey found the assistant he needed for the 

 preparation of the Flora 0/ North America, and the two men 

 were soon associated in this work which was to occupy the 

 attention of the younger more or less continuously until the 

 last year of his life. The necessities of the work made it 

 desirable that one of the two scientific partners should visit 

 the collections and libraries of Europe, and so in Novem- 

 ber, 1838, Gray sailed from New York for Liverpool. This 

 journey, which will be found fully described in these vol- 

 umes in a series of letters written in the form of a journal 

 to the members of Dr. Torrey 's family, was, perhaps, the 

 most momentous event in Dr. Gray's life in the influence 

 it exerted on his scientific impulses. The friends that he 

 made at this time. Sir William Hooker, from whom more 

 than from any one else he seems to have derived scientific 

 inspiration, Bentham, the Candolles, INIartius, Decaisne, and 

 the younger Hooker, who of them all now alone survives, were 

 of the greatest assistance to him through life and added 

 much to his happiness and success. 



Space will not permit us to trace, step by step, the career 

 of this remarakable man as displayed in his intimate cor- 

 respondence with these and other friends, and all we can 

 do is to call attention to the fact that these letters contain 

 the best possible record of a useful and distinguished life, 

 and contain also a vast amount of information about 

 botany and the botanists of the century not to be found in 

 any other book with which we are acquainted. They show 

 the man, too, as well as the botanist, and we confess that 

 to us the most delightful part of the whole bgok are the 

 letters to Darwin, written during the War of the Rebellion, 

 in which the Cambridge botanist, bristling with patriotism, 

 berates the author of The Origin of Species on the hostility 

 of England to the northern cause. 



But, interesting as they are from a number of points of 

 view, to those who knew the writer these letters fail to 

 display all the wonderful astuteness of the writer's mind, 

 his great enthusiasm, his genial and kindly wit and that 

 buoyancy of spirits which made him one of the most de- 

 lightful companions. Nor do we, in reading them, obtain 

 a just idea of the helpfulness of the man, for the desire to 

 help others was one of his strongest traits, and he was fond 

 of showing it in a thousand ways, by criticism sometimes 

 caustic, when rebuke was clearly the greatest kindness, 

 by kind advice or direct assistance when assistance meant 

 a loss to the giver of priceless time. 



These letters relate the life of a happv, prosperous and 

 useful man, which lacked only the completion of its great 

 task to have been eminently successful. No man certainly 

 ever worked harder or gave himself more cheerfully to labor. 

 But, like other men of facile expression and great ambi- 

 tions, he was too often led away from the main purpose of 

 his life in efforts to excel in many directions. Perhaps Asa 

 (jray lived too soon to have written an exhaustive Flora of 

 North America, the work which occupied him at different 

 times for fully half a century ; but, looking at the two volumes 

 of that half-finished book, we cannot but regret that other la- 

 bors were allowed to interfere with thecompletionof a work 

 for which he was specially fitted by aptitude, attainment 

 and rare good judgment. The work so well begun still 

 remains where he left it, nor in our time is it likely to be 

 completed. The life of Asa Gray teaches us that with in- 

 dustry, application and enthusiasm a young man in this 

 country can rise to the highest position and to the greatest 

 distinction ; and it teaches us another lesson not less val- 

 uable, that whatever a man's ability may be, great pieces 



