﻿312 



NOTICES OF BOOKS. 

 Letters of Asa Gray. Edited by Jane Loring Gray. London : 

 MacmiUan. 2 vols. 8vo, pp. 838. 

 Mrs. Gray has done well to allow her husband to speak for 

 him- If in these volumes of letters. When Asa Gray was taken 

 from us at the beginning of 1888, many sketches of his life were 

 published by those who had the happiness of knowing him— all 

 combining to form a pleasing picture of the best known and most 

 respected representative of American botanists. He was happily 

 characterised by his compatriot James Russell Lowell in lines 

 which we quoted at the time of his death,* as one 



and the letters here published are such as might have been expected 

 to issue from his pen. They show Asa Gray as the painstaking 

 persevering conscientious worker, devoted to his chosen subject, 

 yet not so absorbed in it as to be unable to find room for other 

 interests and varied sympathies. Our chief interest is naturally 

 in the letters which throw light on his intercourse with fellow- 

 botanists; yet we are glad to have those which he addressed to 

 Dean Church, which show another side of his character, and one 

 which all who knew him, however slightly, must have felt to be 

 present in it. "His religious views," wrote the Dean on the death 

 of his friend, "were a most characteristic part of the man, and the 

 seriousness and earnest conviction with which he let them be 

 known had, I am convinced, a most wholesome effect on the 

 development of the great scientific theory in which he was so much 

 interested. It took off a great deal of the theological edge, which 

 was its danger, both to those who upheld and those who opposed 

 it. I am sure things would have gone more crossly and un- 

 reasonably, if his combination of fearless religion and clearness of 

 mind, and wise love of truth, had not told on the controversy." 

 It is a little strange that, notwithstanding his intimacy with Church, 

 Gray seems never to have understood the Anglican, still less the 

 Catholic, position ; he speaks of the Warden of Keble (Dr. Talbot) 

 as "a man of excellent sense, in spite of his setting in a very 

 superstitious school,'' and naively records that "these very high 

 clergymen have a way of preaching broad-minded sermons." 

 Politically he was a warm admirer of Mr. Gladstone, with whom 

 he "had pleasant talk, on nothing in particular," at a garden-party 

 at Dollis Hill, on the occasion of his last visit to London. His 

 letters to Darwin and others at the time of the war of secession are 

 full of keen observation and sympathy, and the accounts of his 

 travels, notably of his visit to Egypt iu 1869, are very graphic. 

 In spite of his devotion to work, he seems to have been an excellent' 

 correspondent. 



