Chapter VI: Letters to Darwin and Others (4)

3. I have been, am so--_busy_ is not the word for it. I can’t think of any to express it. I suppose that I have now lying by me more than fifty unanswered letters, though I keep answering the most pressing as fast nearly as they come in. But the rest get neglected, inevitably. I read your letters and follow your work in Cuba with interest. I want you to get all the plants you can (but I see not that you can exhaust Cuba), and then come and settle down here, and work up, as you only can, a nice Flora Cubana. That you are bound to do, just as I am to do the Flora of North America. I see some faint prospect that I may yet, and before very long, be able to sit down to it. But you and I are bound to do these two things yet!...

The seeds I put loose in this sheet are Cinchona officinalis. Get the tree introduced into your cooler region, that is, the Caffetals of east Cuba, and the tree will be commercially important in time, and you will be a benefactor of your species. Enough for once.

Ever your old friend, A. GRAY.

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

November 20, 1866.

DEAR ENGELMANN,--Yes, I have a heap of unanswered letters from you. But I have not one moment of time.

I have copy of “Manual” in printer’s hands up to Compositæ, and am only now two days ahead; have been only two hours ahead day after day!! It is awful! So much other work too!...

If I could get five hundred to one thousand more a year I would at once resign professorship and salary....

I am well, never more hearty; but worked like a coach-horse. I have got my fund raised for the Garden: small, but we have now clear $2,500 or $2,600 a year for Garden.

February 27, 1867.

How much I am indebted to you! No one else who undertakes to help me ever makes out much, at least to save me time and trouble....

I have not time to write details of the little I know about the National Academy. But I have seen enough to make it clear that I should not be taking any more responsibility about it. So last month I sent my resignation. They have put me on the list of Honorary Members. The American Academy is as much as I want to attend to, and I do my duty to society in looking well after that....

TO A. DE CANDOLLE.

September 10, 1866.

... The war near you was sharp and quick. Switzerland is as fortunately placed as any small nation can be, when surrounded by strong ones; but you see that in this world only strength can be relied on. See what indignity small and weak nations have to suffer. I trust present peace may last to consolidate a new Germany. But if not, you may have to dread a more general upturning on the Continent.

October 21, 1867.

... Your analysis of the whole subject of rules in nomenclature I think is sound and lawyer-like, or rather _judicial_, as well as judicious. There are dangers and inconveniences on every side, and good sense and discretion are needed in the application of these as of all rules....

Very faithfully yours, ASA GRAY.

TO GEORGE BENTHAM.

January 21, 1867.

MY DEAR BENTHAM,--Many thanks for your kind remembrance of us in your letter at the end of the year, which reached me only three or four days ago. I avail myself of the first foreign post since to return, with Mrs. Gray’s love, our heartiest good wishes to Mrs. Bentham and yourself, and I trust you will be able to keep up yet, for a good many precious years, the steady botanical work which you make so telling....

I have no doubt of the full and entire correctness of the principles you work on; and the Kew Floras and the “Genera Plantarum” will more than anything else determine the public botanical opinion and mode of working for the next generation. But I suspect that there will remain after all a great many monotypic genera (consider how many of the most distinct genera are so, or nearly so); and I imagine it is best to work without prejudice for or against them.

I dare promise I shall be satisfied with all you have done in Compositæ. As to Umbelliferæ, I wish you joy of the job, and do hope you will reduce the genera twenty per cent at least. I never could take the least satisfaction in them. I never could collate our Umbelliferæ with European genera, and I have no clear conception of more than half a dozen of our genera....

Ever, dear Bentham, yours most cordially, A. GRAY.

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

CAMBRIDGE, March 26, 1867.

This is to acknowledge yours of February 28.

You see I have printed your queries[67] privately (fifty copies), as the best way of putting them where useful answers may be expected. Most of them will go into the hands of agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, etc. Others to persons I or Wyman may know and rely on. I wish I had had them sooner. My crony Wyman has been two months in Florida, but will be home again before I could send to him.

I did not write the article in the “Nation” on Popular Lecturing, though it contains so many things I have said over and over that it startled me. Then it hits so many nails square on the head that I should think it could be written only in Cambridge or hereabouts.

It is generally supposed to be written by a person in New York, but I suspect a person near by here,--only suspect....

Yes, Magnolia seeds hang out awhile in autumn, finally stretch and break the threads of spiral vessels. Whether birds eat them I don’t know. They look enticing and have a pulpy coat, are bitter and spicy.

Shall I send you more of these circulars?

I shall send to Indian people too.

TO CHARLES WRIGHT.

April 2, 1867.

I sent your twenty dollars to aid the subscription for the starving Southerners. There have been handsome sums raised for them in the Northern States. But I am afraid you must get most imperfect and one-sided statements of the doings of Congress by the tone of your letters, and decidedly need enlightenment. It is the President, not Congress, that needs to learn the Constitution and the laws of the land. And your Southern loyal friends, if you could get voice of them, would beg Congress to take even more urgent steps for their protection and defense by reconstruction. However, things seem to be going on now pretty satisfactorily. The President is sinking into his deserved insignificance, and the leading rebels are coming out decidedly more sensibly than many of their professed Northern friends. And we hope, therefore, that they may begin to give some fair chance to the loyal men of the South to be heard and to get their rights, which have been indeed shamefully trampled upon by the President and the dominant party at the South....

I have not time to answer all your interesting botanical notes, and can only thank you for them. I hope you will continue to keep well.

Our spring is late and wet. There is still quite a covering of snow in the garden, and we have had a deal of it in the winter, and wretched walking and getting about in every way. Happy you, in the tropics.

You ask who Austin[68] is. He was an old protégé of Dr. Torrey; lives now in New Jersey, and studies Lemnaceæ and Hepaticæ.

... You will be more delighted than I am to know that the Democrats have probably carried Connecticut. But I am not much the contrary; for the Republicans are too many in Congress for their own good, or ours, and it secures the defeat of Barnum for Congress; as it should be....

April 8.

I have been having a Sunday’s work over your plants.

It grieves my heart and will grieve yours badly when I tell you that your boxes were put under a cargo of wet sugar, which drained into them, and have ruined the collection.

... As to specimens to dispose of, say only one half or one third of the whole mass is left fit for it. Oh dear! God grant you patience! Will you have the courage to set to work over again?

I will try next to tell you what is worst.

Ever your disconsolate, A. GRAY.

TO WILLIAM M. CANBY.[69]

July 8, 1867.

MY DEAR CANBY, ... I am charmed with what you say of Dionæa, can confirm some of it, and believe all the rest. Never mind the anatomy of the leaf now--little promise from that; but do go on with experiments on feeding, and record them carefully, and publish when ready.

I am going to send your letter to Darwin, who will be delighted, and will probably suggest experiments. He has an eminently suggestive mind.

I suppose you know the slow way Drosera rotundifolia catches flies, doubtless for same purpose, though it can absorb the juices only through its bristles. I always thought it took in only the gases disengaged by putrefaction.

If you don’t know the trick of Drosera, which you should study, too, I will tell you, if you write to me at Sauquoit, Oneida County, New York.

SAUQUOIT, N. Y., July 17.

I have here yours of 13th.

If on leaf of Drosera rotundifolia, in good healthy condition, you put a small fly--somewhat crippled is surer--the sticky pellucid glands will hold him fast. By degrees (I have never seen it under ten or twelve hours at least) some of the bristles outside, which have not touched the fly, will turn inward and bring their sticky tip against the insect; later still others and more external ones turn in, and so the fly is bound by many liliputian bands. As it putrefies, I wonder if the leaf merely takes its chance of getting some of the disengaged gases, or whether it reabsorbs the clear fluid of the glands, charged now with some animal matter.

In transplanting some Drosera into a pan with wet moss, the older leaves may not work well; but the new ones developed soon will do better. Pray experiment upon this and Dionæa. I wonder if there ever were series of intermediate states between the inefficient Drosera, and the expert Dionæa....

August 21.

... I inclose half a letter which came from Darwin this morning. I hope you will go on with work on Dionæa....

C. DARWIN TO A. GRAY.

(Half of letter referred to above.)

DOWN, BROMLEY, KENT, August 8.

MY DEAR GRAY,--I have been glad to see Mr. Canby’s interesting letter on Dionæa, and I thank you for sending it; but unfortunately the facts are not new to me. Several years ago I observed the secretion of the “gastric juices” and the close adhesion of the two sides of the leaf when a fly was caught. I keep my notes in such an odd fashion that it would take me some time to find them. I am almost sure I ascertained the acid reaction of the secretion and its antiseptic power, but I cannot remember whether in this, or in analogous cases, I found its subsequent reabsorption. This letter fires me up to complete and publish on Drosera, Dionæa, etc., but when I shall get time I know not. I am working like a slave to complete my book.

TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.

July 6, 1867.

... Well, I have been free from much college work for ten days, and am quite free after Wednesday morning.

I seem as well as possible, bright and clear, and should be content just to visit my old mother and come right back to work on Californian plants, which I have been looking at for a few days. But my wife says I shall take four weeks, and on being weighed I find that my former 140-143 lbs. is reduced to 131.

So I must waste time and money in traveling, which I am reconciled to, as Mrs. Gray needs it much.

From Oneida County, New York, I am going (with Mrs. G.) to drive into northwest and central Pennsylvania and then visit a sister in Michigan. Mrs. Gray insists that we must go to Chicago, which she wishes to see, though I do not. I hate towns, especially new ones. Only think how near I shall be to you!

So you saw old Bigelow, who is quite delighted with Shaw’s grounds, etc.

Torrey has just made me a little visit. Good, kind soul he is....

August 15.

We got home three days ago. Hot weather broke down my wife’s courage, as I feared, and we went no farther west than Tecumseh, Michigan; made a short visit to Sullivant at Columbus, then meandered through west and north of Pennsylvania to central New York again, and hearing of Mrs. Gray’s father’s illness came rapidly home....

I am very well; have put on three pounds’ weight.

We must go and see you and all the great West at some proper season, spring or late fall....

I germinated for two years Nelumbium, but soon lose them. If you can, send me some seeds this fall to try once more....

TO GEORGE BENTHAM.

October 14, 1867.

... Yes, I did receive your address,[70] read it hastily, and sent it to “Silliman’s Journal” to be reprinted. It was too late for the September number, but will be the leading article in the November number. I have read a proof and am daily expecting a printed sheet, which I can send to you, with one or two little remarks. I was exceedingly pleased with it; so is Professor Henry. We both wondered how you could have so exactly hit not one, but several nails on the head, as you have done. It will be much read here, and will be truly useful.

You remind me that I ought to have criticised your working of Australian Compositæ. The trouble is, that, except North American genera, these things have long been quite out of my head. It will be unsafe for me to approve or otherwise till I can get at work a little over them, which it is not likely I can at present. I just fancy that in your dislike of monotypic genera--which you abhor as nature does a vacuum--you may have lumped up the angiantheous genera rather too much.

I am straining every nerve to get into a position to get at a synopsis of North American plants, and my present work upon Bolander’s collection is a part of the preparation. But I cannot lay the corner-stone till college work is over, next July. Meanwhile I want suggestions as to form, and how to condense references to the utmost and crowd a page, yet leaving it clear and comely. When I have got the thing blocked out, and have worked up a part, then Mrs. G. and I hope to go over and see you, and to stay a good long while. Adieu, till next week.

Ever yours, A. GRAY.

TO R. W. CHURCH.

December 5, 1867.

Before the year closes I mean you shall have a note from me, to renew on my part an intercourse which has been interrupted through negligence of mine. I find I get more and more overloaded as I grow older, and I dare say you find it the same. Still we must exchange a word now and then.

I have to tell you of the severe loss we have had in the death, in October, of Mrs. Gray’s good and kind father, Mr. Loring. He and my wife were very much to each other, and in former years had been unusually intimate companions; and his death at seventy-three, quite unexpected till within a few weeks of the event, is very much felt. Mrs. Gray’s own health, too, is but poor, though on the whole I trust it is becoming firmer.

If you see your friend Mr. Fraser (whom I, unfortunately, did not) you may learn from him what manner of man Mr. Loring was. I wish I knew him, to say to him how highly we value a letter he lately addressed to Mrs. Loring, and which I read yesterday,--so full of sympathy and just appreciation.

Mr. Fraser, you may be sure, is very much thought of here.

I hope that Dr. Hooker, of Kew, has sent on to you the numbers of the “Nation,” which I have for a year or more regularly posted to him, originally requesting he should do so. But it is quite likely the busy man has forgotten all about it.

For myself, I have passed my fifty-seventh anniversary, in firm health, feeling my age only in a treacherous memory--as respects names, etc., not as to events or friends. The memory of our delightful visit to Oxford is ever fresh.

TO CHARLES DARWIN.

February 24, 1868.

The other evening here I discoursed at our private club, by giving them an abstract of the chapters on Inheritance and Pangenesis; the former for Professor Bowen’s benefit. He and Agassiz took it all very well; and pangenesis seemed to strike all of us as being as good an hypothesis as one can now make....

On inside of leaf of Dionæa see the copious glands for secreting gastric juice.

... I do not wonder at your book[71] being taken up at once, by the great numbers of people who need and understand it, and the thousands who jump at anything written by so notorious a writer as you are. The “Origin” will sell anything; and I believe people will get more for their money in this book than in even that, if they care for facts, which generally they do not.

May 25.

I want to write you a long letter, but the time is not to be had now. Many thanks for yours of May 8.

My notice of your book in the “Nation” was not intended to have anything in it, except for the groundlings; was only to make the book known and understood, a light affair.

My preface was written at the publishers’ request simply because yours had not come. The fellows put in both. The edition is not very nicely printed. Judging from the newspaper notices I think the book is taking famously. That agricultural newspaper is taken by the hundred thousand in the country. As to close of my article, to match close of your book,--you see plainly I was put on the defense by your reference to an old hazardous remark of mine. I found your stone-house argument unanswerable in substance (for the notion of design must after all rest mostly on faith, and on accumulation of adaptations, etc.); so all I could do was to find a vulnerable spot in the shaping of it, fire my little shot, and run away in the smoke.

Of course I understand your argument perfectly, and feel the weight of it.

We were intensely amused at the Edinburgh man, who suggests that I could easily smash you into little pieces! I wish he may live to see it done!

I am half dead with drudgery, half of it at least for other people; see no relief but to break up, and run over, with wife, who needs a change, to your side of the water for a good long while.

TO R. W. CHURCH.

June 22, 1868.

I have to send you--in a hasty line--my best thanks for remembering me so kindly: 1. In your letter of January 17, which I am so tardy in responding to.

2. The copy of Hooker edited by you, which I was pleased to have.

3. Your sermon at St. Mary’s, which Mrs. Gray and I both read with much interest. I admired your handling of an important topic, and the solid strength which comes from moderation of statement. It reminded me much of one of our best sermonizers here, who, though a good deal heterodox (I am sorry to say), treats such subjects more impressively than any one else and much in that way, his guarded understatements or concessions telling heavily in the argument.

I read and think of nothing but botany of late, having been too hard pressed for a long while. But last Sunday I read with interest the latter part of Mr. Gladstone’s essay on “Ecce Homo.”

There is something which seems to me very admirable and attachable about Gladstone. I wonder if his church friends and supporters will mostly drop him at the coming struggle, for his action looking to the disestablishment of the Irish church.

But the gist of my present note is to say, that I have got a year’s leave of absence, and Mrs. Gray and I expect to cross over to England in two months.

I find I must break up a set of engagements and of work, mainly for others, which absorbs too much of my time, and Mrs. Gray’s health makes me anxious to avoid another winter here, at present. The change will be good for us both. We mean to pass the whole autumn in England, mostly at Kew, and most of the winter in Italy and perhaps Egypt, where Mrs. Loring, now on the Continent (tell Mr. Fraser), expects to be, and we may be able to join the party, in a climate which may be advantageous after such a winter as our last.

Very sincerely yours, ASA GRAY.