11 FEBRUARY 1888, Page 15

DR. ASA GRAY.

[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.") SIR,—It is scarcely fitting that the grave should close over the remains of Dr. Asa Gray without a few works of notice in your

journal, of which he was a frequent, I believe a constant reader. To many of your readers, Dr. Gray and his wife were known personally on their frequent visits to this country ; and in them the news of his death will awaken a keen feeling of loss, and of sympathy with the devoted wife who is now a widow.

By many others of your readers, a lively picture of Dr. Gray will have been gathered from the "Life and Letters " of Darwin.

They will remember how our English naturalist concluded, from merely reading some of Dr. Gray's letters to his old friend Sir Joseph Hooker, that he must be a man with something very loveable about him : they will remember how, when the two men came to know each other, they formed a constant friendship ; and some, too, will remember how Dr. Gray sent a parcel of stamps to cheer the sick-bed of his friend's young son (and he is not the only English child who has received a like present from the same giver).

That Dr. Gray was facile princeps of American botanists, is not, I suppose, open to doubt ; the graceful tribute which

they paid to him on his seventy-fifth birthday attests the respect and love in which they held him. But, furthermore, I suppose it to be equally clear that he stood amongst the very front rank of all botanists of all countries.

For years he laboured to reduce to order the ever-increasing collections which represent the flora of his native country. He made a great study of geographical botany; and those who have read his essay on the distribution of the Sequoia, or his explana- tion of the likeness of the flora of the East Coast of America with Japan, or his account of the influence of railways on the distribution of European plants throughout America, will not soon forget him. But he was more than a mere botanist : he was deeply interested in philosophical speculations, and he was essentially a religious man, and made no secret of his faith. He describes himself in a preface to some of his essays as "in his own fashion a Darwinian, philosophically a convinced theist, and religiously an acceptor of the 'Creed commonly called the Nicene' as the exponent of the Christian faith."

But to those who had the happiness to know Dr. Gray, he was more than all this: he was a man of a singularly sweet and beautiful nature : not his years, and the wisdom and learning that they brought with them, not all his incessant studies, not his high place in the scientific world, not even the classification of the American Composites (under which he literally groaned), —not all these things deprived him of the freshness and bright- ness that recalled nothing but youth : he seemed for himself

to have attained to the wisdom which the poet has commended to us :— " Wiser it were to welcome and make ours

Whate'er of good, though small, the present brings, Kind greetings, sunshine, songs of birds and flowers, With a child's pure delight in little things: And of the griefs unborn to rest secure, Knowing that mercy ever will endure."