Goodale.] 
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[Feb. 15, 
nection with the Smithsonian Institution, and who were to give 
such an impetus to physical and natural science in America. 
A serious disappointment attended this first visit to New York 
city. The youth had brought a package of botanical puzzles for 
the celebrated Dr. Torrey to unravel, but the botanist was absent, 
and the package was left as a basis for subsequent correspondence. 
In the succeeding year or two, he taught chemistry, geology, min- 
eralogy, and botany, in a boy’s school in Utica, making journeys 
in the vacations. On one of these he met Dr. Torrey and began 
that personal acquaintance which fixed his determination to be a 
botanist. 
He became the assistant in botany to Dr. Torrey who was then 
Professor in a prominent medical school, and devoted much of his 
time to the herbarium. In that year he issued a set of North Amer- 
ican sedges and grasses, and this may be spoken of as his first bo- 
tanical publication; indeed, Sir William Hooker says of it, “Dr. 
Asa Gray has already deserved well of science by the publication 
of his specimens illustrative of the grasses and Cyperacese of N. A. 
of which the first volume has appeared, and it may be fairly classed 
among the most beautiful and useful works of the kind that we are 
acquainted with.” 
Now began his botanical career. His training for it had been 
of a broad kind. He had been a student in medicine, in itself a 
good training in observation ; he had taught botany and certain 
collateral sciences in a manner so satisfactory, that at the age of 
twenty-two his name was proposed as a candidate for a professor- 
ship in Hamilton College. It was not an insufficient discipline 
with which he went to his work with Torrey. 
This second period, extending from his acceptance of Dr. Tor- 
rey’s offer to his removal to Cambridge, was marked by four im- 
portant events : First, his forced interruption of S 3 7 stematic work 
by the failure of the means at Torrey’s disposal, which led young 
Gray to prepare an educational work. At this time he became 
curator of the Lyceum of Natural History in New York, an occu- 
pation which made no serious demands upon his energies, and he 
was able to give his best work to the book. This treatise, pub- 
lished in 1836, under the title Elements of Botany, possesses the char- 
acteristics of style with which you are familiar in his later works, 
breadth of scope, nicety of distinction, felicity of expression. The 
