For ourselves, your letter found us here just on the eve of our month’s holiday, a trip to Lake George, and thence to my natal region, in the most beautiful (and the most English-looking) part of the State of New York.... My wife was well enough to do her small part in a great fair held in Boston for the United States Sanitary Commission (which has kept the ladies very busy for the last six months), which has just closed, having brought the net proceeds of about $125,000 (it turns out $140,000) for the relief of suffering.
As to our national affairs, I should like now and then to send you such comments or articles as seem to me to throw most light upon our condition. There is little I could say in a letter. I said very early to English friends that if the rebellion were short it might leave things much as they were before (no desirable state), but if long and obstinate, it would cut the knot we were unable to untie and completely destroy the slave system. You see now it is coming to pass, by rather slow but sure steps, and a great blessing it is to be to the South. To the North the war, with all its sad evils, has been a great good, morally and politically. The end is in the hands of Providence, and we humbly wait for it; but there is very little diversity of opinion here as to what, essentially, the end is to be, that is, the complete territorial reinstatement of the Union, and the abolition of slavery. Very sanguine, you think, in England. We must wait and see, and on our part hope and labor.
Now for a little personal matter. I have long been anxious for the safety and final destination of my herbarium and other botanical collections, which in my house (besides that, there is not room for them) are too liable to destruction from fire. I had offered them, with my botanical library, to our university, if they would build in the Botanic Garden a fireproof building to hold them, and raise a small fund for their support. Recently and quite unexpectedly, a banker in Boston, almost unknown to me personally, has offered in any case to construct the building, and a few friends are taking steps, with good prospects, to raise by gifts a fund of $10,000 for the support of the establishment. When done, I shall feel that my collections, which are most important for North American botany, are secure for the use of future botanists. To secure this I gladly divest myself of the ownership of collections which have absorbed most of my small spare means for the last thirty years, and which are valued at $20,000 or more....
In the council of our American Academy (of which since May last I have been president) we have nominated Dean Milman to the foreign honorary membership vacated by the death of Whately, and Max Müller to that vacated by Grimm. The election has not yet taken place.
Mrs. Gray, with kind regards, joins me in best wishes for the new year to you and yours.
Very sincerely yours,
Asa Gray.
TO A. DE CANDOLLE.
Cambridge, December 22, 1863.
My dear De Candolle,—I thank you cordially for your letter of the 13th November, and for the copy of Thury’s interesting and curious paper. This I had not seen, neither Pictet’s notice. I find it very interesting, but I do not see how he got a legitimate deduction from the facts given by Knight in the vegetable kingdom to his principle in the animal kingdom. However, that is of small moment if the principle holds. The subject is one which will naturally attract much attention, and which, as you remark, has philosophical bearings. I mean to bring it up, next week, for discussion at our private (social) scientific club in Cambridge.
I thank you also for the good spirit in which you take, as I meant them, my criticisms upon your article on Species, etc. There is no progress to be made upon such interesting subjects without free criticism, because without it we cannot perfectly clear up our own views nor impart them perfectly to others. And especially, since I have so often to criticise the views or writings of persons for whom I have no particular regard, it is pleasant, if only for the sake of impartiality, to criticise those for whom you have the greatest regard and respect. So I particularly like it when I can criticise such a near friend as J. D. Hooker or Bentham, and I believe they like it, too, at least Hooker, who is himself a very free critic. Of course, I know very well that you will be likely to turn all the points I made. The question upon which of the two foundations the idea of species rests, I well know is not to be settled off-hand by any bit of argument. Pray take up the cudgels against me whenever an occasion offers.