Richard Schickel
American film scholar
Asa Gray
American botanist (1810-1888)
Asa Gray is considered the most important American botanist of the 19th century. His Darwiniana was considered an important explanation of how religion and science were not necessarily mutually exclusive.
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About the Asa Gray
Asa Gray is considered the most important American botanist of the 19th century. His Darwiniana was considered an important explanation of how religion and science were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Gray was adamant that a genetic connection must exist between all members of a species. He was also strongly opposed to the ideas of hybridization within one generation and special creation in the sense of its not allowing for evolution. He was a strong supporter of Darwin, although Gray’s theistic evolution was guided by a Creator.
As a professor of botany at Harvard University for several decades, Gray regularly visited, and corresponded with, many of the leading natural scientists of the era, including Charles Darwin, who held great regard for him. Gray made several trips to Europe to collaborate with leading European scientists of the era, as well as trips to the southern and western United States. He also built an extensive network of specimen collectors.
A prolific writer, he was instrumental in unifying the taxonomic knowledge of the plants of North America. Of Gray’s many works on botany, the most popular was his Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States, from New England to Wisconsin and South to Ohio and Pennsylvania Inclusive, known today simply as Gray’s Manual. Gray was the sole author of the first five editions of the book and co-author of the sixth, with botanical illustrations by Isaac Sprague. Further editions have been published, and it remains a standard in the field. Gray also worked extensively on a phenomenon that is now called the “Asa Gray disjunction”, namely, the surprising morphological similarities between many eastern Asian and eastern North American plants. Several structures, geographic features, and plants have been named after Gray.
In 1848, Gray was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.
22 Quotes by Asa Gray
- 1.
Is it philosophical, is it quite allowable, to assume without evidence from fossil plants that the family or any of the genera was once larger and wide spread? and occupied a continuous area?
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 2.
Your candor is worth everything to your cause. It is refreshing to find a person with a new theory who frankly confesses that he finds difficulties, insurmountable, at least for the present.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 3.
We may take it to be the accepted idea that the Mosaic books were not handed down to us for our instruction in scientific knowledge, and that it is our duty to ground our scientific beliefs upon observation and inference, unmixed with considerations of a different order.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 4.
I take it for granted that you do not wish to hear an echo from the pulpit nor from the theological class-room.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 5.
I know some people who never have any difficulties to speak of. The moment I understood your premisses, I felt sure you had a real foundation to hold on.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 6.
The best opinion now is, that there are multitudinous forms which are not sufficiently differentiated to be distinctively either plant or animal, while, as respects ordinary plants and animals, the difficulty of laying down a definition has become far greater than ever before.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 7.
Indeed upon much that may have to say, I expect rather the charitable judgment than the full assent of those whose approbation I could most wish to win.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 8.
Next it was found that it was physiologically and structurally the same in the plant, that it was the living part of the plant, that which manifested the life and did the work in vegetable as well as in animal organisms.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 9.
Many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 10.
This substance, which is manifold in its forms and protean in its transformations, has, in its state of living matter, one physiological name which has become familiar, that of protoplasm.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 11.
There is a class, moreover, by whom all these scientific theories, and more are held as ascertained facts, and as the basis of philosophical inferences which strike at the root of theistic beliefs.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 12.
In short, the animal and vegetable lines, diverging widely above, join below in a loop.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 13.
I proceed with the proper subject of this discourse; namely, the further changes in scientific belief, which have occurred within my own recollection, even since the time when I first aspired to authorship, now forty- five years ago.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 14.
I am sufficiently convinced already that the members of a profession know their own calling better than anyone else can know it.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 15.
It was implicitly supposed that every living thing was distinctively plant or animal; that there were real and profound differences between the two, if only they could be seized.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 16.
Why is it not just as likely that there were as many small general nearly at first as now, and as great a disproportion in the number of their species?
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 17.
The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 18.
But it was soon ascertained that this quaternary matter of the animal body was chemically the same in the plant, was elaborated there, and only appropriated by the animal.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 19.
It remains to consider what attitude thoughtful men and Christian believers should take respecting them, and how they stand related to beliefs of another order.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 20.
It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 21.
I accept extinction as best explaining disjoined species. I see that the same cause must have reduced many species of great range to small, and that it may have reduced large genera to so small, and of families.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)
- 22.
We have spoken of beings so low in the scale that the individuals throughout their whole existence are not sufficiently specialized to be distinctively plant or animal: yet these are definite life in simpler shape.
Asa GrayAmerican botanist (1810-1888)