Botanists -- United States -- Correspondence; Gray, Asa, 1810-1888 -- Correspondence
I had lately been writing brief notices of several of our botanists,
deceased, for the May number of “Silliman’s Journal” (as you see, I mail
a copy just received); and at the time I felt that they probably would
not be published before there would be another and more distinguished
name to add.
I shall not wait for the year to come round, but I hope to draw up a
brief tribute to his memory for the July number of “Silliman’s Journal.”
So I should be much obliged to you for the dates and other particulars
you kindly offer to furnish. I hope that autobiography which you are so
fortunate as to possess is of such a character that it may be printed,
and that you will give it along with a little memoir from your own pen.
It will be quite in your way, and I would rather you should do it than
any one else....
By the way, I may as well mention that Dr. Darlington told me that
certain letters, etc., of Baldwin’s, which he could not print, as they
were severe on Nuttall, should come into my possession after his own
death. You will probably know if any bundle of papers is left, directed
to my charge.
TO CHARLES DARWIN.
CAMBRIDGE, March 22, 1863.
MY DEAR DARWIN,--Argyle’s article on the Supernatural, to which you
called my attention a long while ago, I never happened to see till
to-day, when I have read it through. It is quite clever, not deep, but
clear, and I think useful. I see no occasion for finding fault with him,
except in his attempts now and then to direct a little odium against
you, which is unhandsome, for his main points are those I hammered out
in the “Atlantic,” etc.; indeed I see signs of his having read the same.
But it is hardly fair of him, after expressing his complete conviction
that where the operation of natural causes can be clearly traced, the
implication of design, upon its appropriate evidence, is not thereby
rendered less certain or less convincing, to go on to speak of
derivation-doctrine in a way that implies the contrary.
Of course we believers in real design make the most of your “frank” and
natural terms, “contrivance, purpose,” etc., and pooh-pooh your
endeavors to resolve such contrivances into necessary results of certain
physical processes, and make fun of the race between long noses and long
nectaries!
March 23.
Dr. Wyman,[54] who is a sharp fellow, tells me that, on the authority of
the historian Prescott, the Incas of Peru, for no one knows how long,
married their sisters, to keep the perfect purity of the blood. Query:
How did this strong case of close-breeding operate? Did they run out
thereby? Wyman thinks there is no evidence of it.
If it is true, and the Incas stood it for a long course of generations,
you must look to it, for it will bear hard against your theory of the
necessity of crossing. If they run out, you will have a good case.
April 11.
You see that, at length, the thing is nearly done, and, to use the
expression here, rebeldom is “gone up.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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