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Asa Gray. Asa Gray ForMemRS (November 18, 1810 – January 30, 1888) is considered the most important American botanist of the 19th century. [1][2] His Darwiniana was considered an important explanation of how religion and science were not necessarily mutually exclusive.
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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
Asa Gray may not be a household name for most people, but the “Father of American Botany” was a remarkable man. Gray was born in 1810. He began his career as a medical doctor but found that his true passion was for plants.
- 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 · In 1848, Gray was appointed to Harvard University as the first full-time professor of botany in the nation. He virtually created a botanical presence at Harvard, building a herbarium (now named for him), accumulating a botanical library and planting botanical gardens.
Asa Gray, Harvard University professor, and botanist, was born in 1810 in Oneida County, New York, the eldest child of Moses and Roxanna Gray. As a teenager, he attended Fairfield Academy in Herkimer County, where he came under the tutelage of natural scientist James Hadley.
Asa Gray (1810-1888) was responsible for establishing systematic botany at Harvard and the United States. Gray's ties with European botanists combined with his network of collectors in North America allowed him to serve as a central clearinghouse for the identification of plants from newly explored areas of North America.
