Ever yours,
Asa Gray.
TO CHARLES L. BRACE.
1861 (?)
Dear Brace,—I should criticise various things in your last “Times” article, if you were here to talk it over with me.
If you expected Huxley to do what you criticise him for not doing, you would naturally be disappointed. His merit, and his way as a lecturer, is to select some good topic or point of view and make a clear exposition of it, the clearness of which very much depends upon his not scattering himself over too much ground. He naturally kept himself to matters he could handle well, and let alone those upon which, as we very well know, he had nothing in particular to say.
1. “Merest fancies,” “baseless fabric of a dream,” etc.
Why, what made Owen an evolutionist as early as Darwin? And what has made so many naturalists, Mivart, and lately Dana, for instance, evolutionists, who yet think nothing of Natural Selection?
But to illustrate. You allow that the evolutionary pedigree of the horse is made out. But what had “Natural Selection” to do with the making this out?
It would have been all the very same, both the evidence and the ground of the inference, if Natural Selection had never been propounded. There is no evidence how the forms were selected, there is simply the fact of the series of forms, which, with other like evidence, brings conviction to most naturalists that one has somehow come from the other. And this conviction is about as strong to those who do not believe “Natural Selection” will explain it, as those who do.
2. Professor Guyot, you mean. Dana avowedly adopts from Guyot.