I think Mrs. Gray has given some account of our summer vacation. I long to revisit those mountains when the Rhododendrons and Kalmias are in bloom, and to have your company.
We are just home, Mrs. Gray and I, from a fortnight with our friends at Washington,—a pleasant holiday, which of late I have always had at this season, the time of the annual meeting of the regents of the Smithsonian Institution, of which I am one of the lay (i. e., non-congressional) members. It makes a break in the monotony of our winter, which is far milder there than in New England, and the society at Washington is very pleasant. More and more men of mark, and intelligence, and cultivation reside there, at least for the winter months. We left on the day when the contested electoral count began, under the arrangement so happily and hopefully adopted. There is no excitement, and, outside of partisanship, little care which way it is determined, but much that it shall be legitimately determined by evidence, argument, and a decisive judgment.
I am deep in routine botanical work, and with a printer not far behind me, I can think of little else.
TO G. FREDERICK WRIGHT.
Cambridge, April 6, 1877.
Dear Mr. Wright,—What can I ever have said or written which President Fairchild takes to mean that I have the preposterous idea that “changes of environment take place in distinct and definite lines”! He may well ask if “this is not contrary to all evidence.” Even the conception that variation takes place in definite, or at least not in indefinite, lines is an idea which is rather thrown out as tenable, and as inferable from a good many facts, than as anything to swear by. I think so, yet, I am sorry to say, it is no part of Darwinism, pure and simple.
Now, in my turn, what does President F. mean by his “mere fact” “species exist”? That seems to me no fact at all, but an inference. Individuals exist; species are inferred from the relations the individuals are observed to sustain to each other. That species are distinct, in the sense of none blending, is what working naturalists would like to have somebody settle for them in many a troublesome case. That they always have been as much so as they are now is the question under consideration....
May 24.
... Now we can’t go to see you, sorry to say. The reason is, that I am working against time. Hooker is coming over, and we are going in summer to the Rocky Mountains together, according to an old promise of mine. To do it I ought to complete the printing of the part of my “Flora” which I am upon, else I shall suffer in various ways, and there is great danger that I fail.
... Do you notice—I know it will please you—how Kingsley caught at my essay, which was reprinted in England long ago; see his memoirs.