My wife (who sends her love to you and yours) is much amused by your backgammon reminiscence. For the year past we have a way of getting on most peacefully. I sit by her side and play solitaire with two packs of cards, she looks on and helps, and when we don’t succeed there is nobody to “flare up” against but luck.
Ever yours,
A. Gray.
P. S.—I think I never sent you my felicitations upon your election as Foreign Honorary Member of American Academy Arts and Sciences.
We are proud to number you among the seventy-five (too many). And, I may tell you, only two negative votes were cast, one by an Academician who made a speech on the occasion, to which nobody vouchsafed a word of reply.
A. G.
Cambridge, June 19, 1874.
My dear Darwin,—Your second letter reached me last evening, and this morning came from the publishers some copies of the number of “Nature.” You seem as pleased and are as ingenuous as a maiden when she first finds out that she has an admirer!
Now I am a little vexed, as I am apt to be when I let anything be printed without reading the proof myself. Some one has doctored one sentence, and made it say the contrary to what I wrote, and to what is true; I make the reclamation on a separate sheet: and also another, which may be typographical, but which I am confident I could not have written; I surely wrote “to many,” not “in many.”
My claim for you about teleology I have made several times, in “Silliman’s Journal,”[95] and elsewhere. It is a matter on which I have a good deal insisted.
Yours affectionately,
Asa Gray.