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Asa Gray (1810-1888) was a leading 19th-century botanist who wrote a manual of North American plants and corresponded with Charles Darwin. He supported theistic evolution and explored the similarities between Asian and North American plants.
Asa Gray (born November 18, 1810, Sauquoit, New York, U.S.—died January 30, 1888, Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American botanist whose extensive studies of North American flora did more than the work of any other botanist to unify the taxonomic knowledge of plants of this region.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Learn about Asa Gray, a remarkable botanist who founded the Harvard botany department, named many new species, and corresponded with Charles Darwin. Discover how he reconciled his Christian faith with evolutionary theory and influenced the field of plant biogeography.
- Melissa Petruzzello
- Academic Career
- Distribution of Plants
- Advocate and Critic of Darwin
- Further Reading
- Additional Sources
After accepting the professorship of botany at the newly founded University of Michigan, Gray sailed for Europe in 1838 to purchase books for the university and to study the type specimens of American plants in various herbaria. The year-long trip not only prepared Gray for his later task of coordinating North American botany but also laid the foun...
Gray was a pioneer in the field of plant geography. In 1859 he published his most famous contribution to thisfield, a monograph on the botany of Japan and its relations to that of North America. He demonstrated that the similar flora in the two regions had originated in one center and had been dispersed as conditions permitted. (This material was u...
On Sept. 5, 1857, Darwin wrote Gray the famous letter in which he first outlined his theory of the evolution of species by natural selection. Gray became Darwin's first American advocate and also one of his most searching critics. Although Gray accepted the main outlines of Darwin's theory, his insistence that evolution must be directed by some ext...
Gray's correspondence was edited by Jane Loring Gray, Letters of Asa Gray (2 vols., 1893). An excellent biography which includes an analysis of Gray's contributions to botany is A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray, 1810-1888 (1959). See also Andrew D. Rodgers, American Botany, 1873-1892: Decades of Transition (1914; repr. 1944), and Edward Lurie, Louis Agas...
Dupree, A. Hunter, Asa Gray, American botanist, friend of Darwin, Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1988. □
Nov 10, 2018 · Learn about the life and achievements of Asa Gray, the first professor of botany at Harvard and the author of Gray's Manual, a classic reference for American flora. He was also a correspondent and ally of Charles Darwin, and a pioneer of botanical exploration and conservation.
Apr 28, 2011 · Darwin's American advocate was less flashy. The Harvard botanist Asa Gray, it will be recalled, was among those who warmly welcomed Louis Agassiz to America.
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Learn about Asa Gray, the most important American botanist of the 19th century, who supported Darwin's theory of evolution and collected plants in North Carolina. See his biography, publications, awards, and marker location.
