Asa Gray’s reply was contained in a letter to Hooker, written January 5th, 1860, four days after reading the “Origin.” He asks that Darwin may be told of what he had written. He says that the book “is done in a _masterly manner_. It might well have taken twenty years to produce it.” He expressed the intention of reviewing the book, and seeing that Darwin and Hooker had fair play in America. A little later (January 23rd) he wrote to Darwin about the American reprint, etc., and spoke of the work itself in somewhat greater detail:-- “The _best part_, I think, is the _whole_, _i.e._ its _plan_ and _treatment_, the vast amount of facts and acute inferences handled as if you had a perfect mastery of them.... Then your candour is worth everything to your cause. It is refreshing to find a person with a new theory who frankly confesses that he finds difficulties.... The moment I understood your premisses, I felt sure you had a real foundation to hold on.... I am free to say that I never learnt so much from one book as I have from yours.” He considered that the attempt to account for the formation of organs such as eyes by natural selection, was the weakest point in the book. This view is to be explained by his strong teleological convictions. Although Asa Gray was the great exponent of the “Origin” in America, he could not agree with Darwin on one important point--viz. on the exclusion of the ordinary conceptions of design in nature by the principle of natural selection. He believed that the two conceptions could be reconciled, and that design in some way worked in and through natural selection. By design is here meant what Huxley called “the commoner and coarser form of teleology,” and which he believed to be now refuted--“the teleology which supposes that the eye, such as we see it in man or one of the higher vertebrata, was made with the precise structure it exhibits for the purpose of enabling the animal which possesses it to see, has undoubtedly received its death-blow.” Huxley goes on to point out that there is a “wider teleology, which ... is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of evolution ... that the whole world ... is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed.” Therefore, “a sufficient intelligence could, from a knowledge of the properties of the molecules of that vapour, have predicted, say, the state of the fauna of Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what will happen to the vapour of the breath on a cold winter’s day.” (“Genealogy of Animals,” _The Academy_, 1869, reprinted in “Critiques and Addresses,” and quoted in his chapter “On the Reception of the ‘Origin of Species’” in the “Life and Letters,” Vol. II.)