Gray, Asa

(b. Sauquoit, New York, 18 November 1810; d. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 30 January 1888)

botany.

Gray was the son of Moses Gray and Roxana Howard Gray, who had migrated from New England to upstate New York after the American Revolution. He began his education in local schools at Sauquoit and for a time attended an academy at nearby Clinton, New York. In 1825 he entered Fairfield Academy and after a year began attending medical lectures at Fairfield’s College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Western District of the State of New York. Here he came under the influence of a remarkable group of peripatetic medical teachers, including James Hadley, who introduced Gray to chemistry, mineralogy, and especially botany. He began to collect plants during his apprenticeship in Bridgewater, New York, where for a brief time after receiving his M.D. degree in 1831 he practiced medicine.

Already in touch with the leading botanist in the United States, John Torrey of New York, Gray abandoned the practice of medicine in 1832 and spent the next five years in a series of part-time teaching and library positions while increasingly concentrating on botany and making himself so useful to Torrey that he became a full collaborator on the Flora of North America. In 1836 he became a member of the scientific corps of the U.S. Exploring Expedition but, tired by the delays in its sailing, he resigned in 1838 to take a professorship at the newly organized University of Michigan. That position entailed Gray’s spending a year in Europe, ostensibly to buy a general collection of books for the library but also to make the acquaintance of botanists and to study specimens of American plants in English and Continental herbaria. After his return in 1839, he worked on the Flora of North America while waiting in vain for a call from the nearly bankrupt state of Michigan. In 1842 Gray accepted the Fisher professorship of natural history at Harvard University, with the understanding that he could confine his activities to botany and the botanic garden. This milestone in the specialization of natural history made him the only adequately supported professional botanist in the United States and provided the home setting, both physically and institutionally, for the rest of his life.

Gray taught an elementary course in botany and offered a slight amount of advanced work to students of Harvard College, and later the Lawrence Scientific School, for thirty years. In 1848 he married Jane Lathrop Loring, daughter of a Boston lawyer and member of the Harvard Corporation. After 1873 he retired from teaching but continued to live in the house in the botanic garden and to develop the herbarium which ultimately became the property of Harvard. The only real breaks in the routine of his life after 1848 were a series of journeys—to Europe in 1850–1851, 1855, 1868–1869, 1880–1881, and 1887. He collected in the southern Appalachians as a young man and after the completion of the transcontinental railroad was fond of excursions to California, the trans-Mississippi West, and Mexico. Within this framework he lived an active and disciplined life until his last illness, which began in November 1887.

Gray became the leading botanical taxonomist in America in the nineteenth century, not because he was uninterested in physiology or unaware of the major advances made possible by the development of the achromatic microscope, but, rather, because the American setting demanded priority for a program of classification on a continental scale to match the programs of European nations in all parts of the globe not served by local collectors. Torrey and Gray’s Flora of North America not only accomplished the shift from the Linnaean classification, still prevalent in America in the 1830’s, to a natural system modeled on that of A. L. de Jussieu and A. P. de Candolle but also established the practice of thoroughly basing the taxonomy of American plants on the type specimens, until that time largely in the hands of European herbaria. By 1843 the Flora had proceeded in the Candollean system, beginning with the Ranunculaceae, through the Compositae, some seventy-six orders. At that point duties at Harvard and the flood of botanical returns from American expansion both westward and overseas in the era of Manifest Destiny made further progress by Torrey and Gray impossible.

Their response to the embarrassment of riches was twofold. Both Gray and Torrey devoted much of their time for the next thirty years to elaborating in reports the plants of collections sent in from the explorations. Some of these publications were in government documents, e.g., the Reports of Pacific Railroad Surveys (1855–1857) and the “everlasting” volumes of the botany of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, which were still incomplete at the time of Torrey’s death in 1873. Other reports reflected Gray’s sponsorship of individual collectors, who accompanied boundary surveys in the West and military expeditions, e.g., Plantae Fendlerianae Novi-Mexicanae (1849), Plantae Wrightianae Texano-Neo-Mexicanae (1852, 1853), and “Diagnostic Characters of New Species of Phaenogamous Plants, Collected in Japan by Charles Wright, Botanist of the U. S. North Pacifica Exploring Expedition” (Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 6 [1859], 377–452). In most cases Gray personally elaborated the orders through Compositae and called on others for other groups. Among the most regular and able collaborators besides Torrey were George Engelmann (especially Coniferae and Cactaceae), William Starling Sullivant (mosses), and Moses Ashley Curtis (fungi).

Gray’s other strategy, forced on him by the incompleteness of the Flora and the competition of the textbook writer Alphonso Wood, was to modify his scholarly standards and to limit his range to the northeastern United States, thus producing for general use a manual which covered in one volume all the flowering plants and some of the lower plants as well. The Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States filled a need that the slower-moving Floracould not meet. It went through five editions in Gray’s lifetime and has continued to be used in successive editions to the present time. After 1873 Gray minimized his writing of reports in order to return to the Synoptical Flora of North America. Much of the progress he made on it in his later years involved reworking in the light of accumulated scholarship the families treated in Torrey and Gray, so that it remained incomplete at his death. In matters of nomenclature and taxonomy Gray dominated American botany as no one before or after him; and if in the 1880’s a younger generation was beginning to chafe at his authority his work still made an impressive contribution to the stream of science.

In 1851 Gray had lunch with Charles Darwin at Kew. By 1855 Gray’s correspondence with Joseph Dalton Hooker on the geographical distribution of plants so impressed Darwin that he initiated an exchange of letters directly with Gray. Questions from Darwin led Gray to analyze the American flora on the basis of his Manual in an important paper, “Statistics of the Flora of the Northern United States” (American Journal of Science, 22 [l856], 204–232; 23 [1857], 62–84, 369–403). In 1857 Darwin let Gray in on the secret of the trend of his theory in a letter that became one of the bases of Darwin’s priority for the idea of the origin of species by natural selection over Alfred Russel Wallace in the joint publication by Darwin and Wallace in the Journal of the Linnean Society in 1858.

Using Darwin’s ideas and the collections of plants then coming to him from American expeditions to Japan, Gray explained species and genera of plants which appeared in eastern Asia and eastern North America not as separate creations but as descendants of a Tertiary circum-Boreal flora which had been pushed southward by the Pleistocene glaciation. This exercise in statistics led Gray to “admit that what are termed closely related species may in many cases be lineal descendants from a pristine stock, just as domestic races are.” Thus he reached agreement with Darwin’s main contention early in 1859, months before the publication of Origin of Species. Gray’s announcement was the occasion for a full-dress debate with Louis Agassiz, his Harvard colleague who had imported an idealistic philosophy of natural history into the United States and gained an immense popular following.

After the publication of Origin of Species Gray was one of the leading reviewers on either side of the Atlantic, insisting on a fair hearing for Darwin in America and serving as agent to secure royalties on the American edition for the author. Until the Civil War distracted Gray’s attention, he was through his letters a leading voice in the Darwin circle, urging with Charles Lyell an accommodating strategy in meeting religious objections. Darwin published Gray’s commentary from the Atlantic Monthly at his own expense as a separate pamphlet under the motto “Natural Selection Not Inconsistent With Natural Theology”, Eventually Darwin rejected the strategy suggested by Gray concerning theology and the assertion that natural selection had not damaged the argument from design. Yet Darwin’s later years were largely spent on research that involved plants, and Gray figured prominently in his work on the coiling of tendrils and insectivorous plants. Darwin’s The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species (1877) was dedicated to Gray “as a small tribute of respect and affection.”

After the Civil War, Gray occasionally wrote anonymous articles attacking the religious opponents of Darwin, on the one hand, and those who followed T. H. Huxley into agnosticism, on the other. A clergyman, George Frederick Wright, eventually saw that these occasional pieces had a single author who was putting forward a consistent reconciliation of Darwinism and theism. Therefore he assisted Gray in collecting his occasional essays into a book, Darwiniana (1876), which firmly coupled Gray’s name with the defense of Darwinism, Protestant Christianity, and the argument from design in nature. In 1881 Gray delivered a series of lectures at Yale Divinity School which were published as Natural Science and Religion. Their failure to cause a stir is a measure of the accommodation reached by that time between Darwinism and American Protestantism.

Without being a forceful lecturer or teacher, Gray nevertheless was a major force in scientific education in his day. His full line of textbooks shaped botanical education in the United States from the 1840’s into the twentieth century. If few of his Harvard undergraduate students became professional botanists, he trained informally and assisted a whole generation of frontier collectors and part-time specialists who formed the rank and file of the botanical profession until German-trained Ph.D.’s began to appear in considerable numbers in the 1870’s.

Gray was a more modest institution builder than his colleague Louis Agassiz, but in 1842 he had found Boston and Cambridge with few resources, and he left them a permanent center of botanical study in the Harvard Botanic Garden and the Gray Herbarium. In addition, when he retired from active teaching in 1873, Harvard engaged four men in his place, some of them—e.g., Charles Sprague Sargent— major institution builders themselves. While his relationship with Darwin marks the peak of Gray’s career, his importaint on the pursuit of botany in the United States is also pervasive and enduring.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Gray’s published writings, some 780 titles, are listed in [Sereno Watson and G. L. Goodale], List of the Writings of Dr. Asa Gray, Chronologically Arranged, With an Index,” in American Journal of Science, 36 (1888), app., 3–67. The major published collections of his works are Scientific Papers of Asa Gray, Charles S. Sargent, ed., 2 vols. (Boston, 1889); The Letters of Asa Gray, Jane Loring Gray, ed., 2 vols. (Boston, 1893); and Darwiniana (New York, 1876), A. Hunter Dupree, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).

The major MS collection is preserved in the Harvard University Herbarium, the library of which contains Gray’s books, many of them annotated.

II. Secondary Literature. The recent full-scale biography is A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray 1810–1888 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), which includes notes and bibliography. Also relevant is A. D. Rodgers III, American Botany, 1873–1892: Decades of Transition (Princeton, 1944).

A. Hunter Dupree