Gray, Asa

Gray, Asa (1810–1888), botanist.A native of upstate New York, Gray earned an M.D. degree from the Fairfield (New York) Medical School in 1831, at a time when medical schools required little preliminary education and awarded degrees after only eight months of coursework. Gray briefly practiced medicine but increasingly turned his attention to botany. In 1842, Gray accepted Harvard College's offer of a professorship of natural history with special responsibility for botany. Although Gray quit teaching in 1873, he remained on the Harvard faculty until his death in 1888. His various textbooks brought him national fame, while his scientific work won him international acclaim as America's leading taxonomic botanist.

Gray is best remembered for the prominent role he played in the American debates over Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). Gray, who had met Darwin during a visit to England in 1851 and had subsequently corresponded with him, sought to ensure that his English friend received “fair‐play” in North America. An orthodox, if not particularly pious, Congregationalist Christian, Gray also strove to present Darwin's theory in a theistic light. He proposed that the unexplained organic variations on which natural selection acted be attributed to divine providence, a suggestion that Darwin rejected. Gray urged not only a “special origination” in connection with the appearance of human beings, but expressed skepticism about the ability of natural selection “to account for the formation of organs, the making of eyes, &c.” Although he described himself as “one who is scientifically, and in his own fashion, a Darwinian,” he confessed to a friend that his theistic interpretation of evolution was “very anti‐Darwin.” Gray presented his views in two influential books: Darwiniana (1876), a collection of previously anonymous essays and reviews; and Natural Science and Religion (1880), based on a series of lectures at Yale Divinity School.
See also Agassiz, Louis; Biological Sciences; Evolution, Theory of; Religion; Science: Revolutionary War to World War I.

Bibliography

A. Hunter Dupree , Asa Gray, 1810–1888, 1959.
Ronald L. Numbers , Darwinism Comes to America, 1998.

Ronald L. Numbers