After Dr. Gray’s return from Europe, his busy life went on, filled with college work and the care of the Garden as accompaniments to a study of the new collections constantly coming in, the work on the Exploring Expedition, the keeping his various botanical text-books in their new editions up with the advancing science, and his always large correspondence. His letters were chiefly on the questions upon which he was working, but with many touches on events of interest of the day, and little playful turns. He says in a letter to Dr. Engelmann, “I well know I have too many irons in the fire.”
Unfortunately, Mr. Darwin destroyed all the letters he received before 1862, except the one published in his “Life and Letters,” which is inserted later, as well as one to Sir Joseph Hooker taken from the same volume. The rest of those to Sir Joseph are mostly bound up in the botanical correspondence at Kew.
Dr. Gray was an immense worker. After his morning mail was received and looked over, that he might answer any imperative questions, he took daylight for his scientific work, and, with pauses for meals, and the necessary interruptions that came at times, he kept steadily on all the day. He wrote his letters and his elementary botanical works mostly in the evening. But in his younger days his eyes were unusually strong, and he would work with the microscope by lamp-light as readily as by daylight.
Though a steady and unwearying worker he was not rapid. He would throw aside sheet after sheet to be rewritten, especially if there was anything he wished to make particularly clear and strong, or any reasoning to be worked out from the soundest point of view. It was always a wonder to those about him that he could stand as he did the unceasing labor, but he was a sound sleeper even if the hours might be short, and of a vigorous, wiry, active temperament, and when he did take a holiday, he took it heartily. His rest and recreation were in journeys, longer or shorter, and every two or three years some long outing would be taken, to give him the needed refreshment. But he must always be busy even then, somewhere to go, something to see; rest in quiet seemed impossible to him for more than a day at a time.
TO CHARLES WRIGHT.
Cambridge, January 23, 1852.
I am printing on “Plantæ Wrightianæ,” the first part of which (as I work in so much general matter, especially Tex-Mexican), to the end of Compositæ, will take 225 pages or more, with ten plates,—the most important memoir I ever wrote, and will indelibly fix our name on the Texan-New-Mexican Flora....
I have just found a letter of Sullivant’s, dated May 27, 1850, in which he says, “Send me by all means Wright’s Texan Mosses and Hepaticæ....”
Poor fellow! as I wrote you before, he lost his wife while I was away, and was overwhelmed, as she was everything to him, and as good a muscologist almost as he....
You are in a fine field. Hold on and keep a good heart. I long to see what Colonel Graham is now bringing on to me....