Professor Asa Gray

Abstract

WHEN the history of the progress of botany during the nineteenth century shall be written, two names will hold high positions; those of Prof. Augustin Pyrame De Candolle and of Prof. Asa Gray. In many respects the careers of these men were very similar, though they were neither fellow-countrymen nor were they contemporaries, for the one sank to his rest in the Old World as the other rose to eminence in the New. They were great teachers in great schools, prolific writers, and authors of the best elementary works on botany of their day. Each devoted half a century of unremitting labour to the investigation and description of the plants of continental areas, and they founded herbaria and libraries, each in his own country, which have become permanent and quasi-national institutions. Nor were they unlike in personal qualities, for they were social and genial men, as active in aiding others as they were indefatigable in their own researches; and both were admirable correspondents. Lastly, there is much in their lives and works that recalls the career of Linnæus, of whom they were worthy disciples, in the comprehensiveness of their labour, the excellence of their methods, their judicious conception of the limits of genera and species, the terseness and accuracy of their descriptions, and the clearness of their scientific language.