BLIC WORKS:--The Falls of Minnehaha--A Park for Wilmington 12

FLOWER MARKETS:--New York--Philadelphia--Boston 12

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Asa Gray.

The whole civilized world is mourning the death of Asa Gray with a
depth of feeling and appreciation perhaps never accorded before to a
scholar and man of science.

To the editors of this Journal the loss at the very outset of their
labors is serious indeed. They lose a wise and sympathetic adviser of
great experience and mature judgment to whom they could always have
turned with entire freedom and in perfect confidence; and they lose a
contributor whose vast stores of knowledge and graceful pen might, it
was reasonable to hope, have long enriched their columns.

The career of Asa Gray is interesting from many points of view. It is
the story of the life of a man born in humble circumstances, without
the advantages of early education, without inherited genius--for
there is no trace in his yeoman ancestry of any germ of intellectual
greatness--who succeeded in gaining through native intelligence,
industry and force of character, a position in the very front rank
of the scientific men of his age. Among the naturalists who,
since Linnaeus, have devoted their lives to the description and
classification of plants, four or five stand out prominently in the
character and importance of their work. In this little group Asa Gray
has fairly won for himself a lasting position. But he was something
more than a mere systematist. He showed himself capable of drawing
broad philosophical conclusions from the dry facts he collected
and elaborated with such untiring industry and zeal. This power
of comprehensive generalization he showed in his paper upon the
"Characters of Certain New Species of Plants Collected in Japan"
by Charles Wright, published nearly thirty years ago. Here he first
pointed out the extraordinary similarity between the Floras of Eastern
North America and Japan, and then explained the peculiar distribution
of plants through the northern hemisphere by tracing their direct
descent through geological eras from ancestors which flourished in
the arctic regions down to the latest tertiary period. This paper
was Professor Gray's most remarkable and interesting contribution
to science. It at once raised him to high rank among philosophical
naturalists and drew the attention of the whole scientific world to
the Cambridge b