ehensive
exposition of the great doctrine of the conservation and correlation
of force. It was Asa Gray who brought us into touch with this new
science just then announcing itself to the world. He was a co-worker
and a compeer of the pioneers who at that moment were breaking a way
for it, and it was our privilege to sit at the feet of a master.

In later years his fame spread wide. He was recognised as the leader
in America in his special field, and in a class with the best men
of foreign lands. He was long a correspondent and special friend of
Darwin, to the spread of whose doctrines he rendered great service.
The fact that religiously he adhered to the time-honoured evangelical
tenets helped much in the war which the new science was forced to wage
with the _odium theologicum_. The new science, it must be said,
perhaps has hardly yet made sure its footing. Are Natural Selection
and Survival of the Fittest clews with which we can face confidently
the workings of the "roaring-gloom that weaves for God the garment we
see him by"? But no doctrine is better accepted than that in some way
Evolution and not Special Creations is the scheme of the world. Toward
this acceptance Asa Gray helped powerfully, a champion always bold,
humane, broad-minded. We used to laugh about the prompter he seemed to
have at the top of the light-well in the sky-light in Holden Chapel.
In a deeper sense than we knew the good man received his prompting
from the clear upper sky.

A naturalist who sixty years ago had, and perhaps still has, a much
wider fame than Asa Gray was Louis Agassiz. He had come a few
years before from Europe, a man in his prime, of great fame. He was
strikingly handsome, with a dome-like head under flowing black locks,
large dark, mobile eyes set in features strong and comely, and with
a well-proportioned stalwart frame. At the moment his prestige was
greater, perhaps, than that of any other Harvard professor. His
knowledge seemed almost boundless. His glacial theory had put him
among the geological chiefs, and as to animated nature he had ordered
and systematised, from the lowest plant-forms up to the crown of
creation, the human being. Abroad we knew he was held to be an adept
in the most difficult fields and now in his new environment he was
pushing his investigations with passionate zeal. But the boys found in
him points on which a laugh could be hung. As he strode homeward from
his walks in the outer fields or marshes,