Asa Gray student Daniel Cady Eaton
Harvard professor
Both Gray and Torrey were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in December 1841. Gray never returned to teach a course at Michigan. In 1833 Dr. Joshua Fisher, a resident of Beverly, Massachusetts, and a Harvard University alumnus, bequeathed $20,000 to Harvard to endow a chair in natural history. The university allowed the proceeds to accumulate until it could fund a full year's salary for a professor. Because of this and a few problems in finding a suitable professor, this chair was not filled until it was formally offered to Gray on March 26, 1842. The offer was $1,000/year salary, teaching duties limited to only botany, and being superintendent of Harvard's botanic garden. While the salary was low, the teaching limitation, rare for the time, allowed him plenty of time to do research and work in the botanic garden. After an exchange of letters, Gray accepted this appointment as Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard. The formal appointment was made April 30, 1842. Gray arrived at Harvard on July 22, 1842, and began his duties in September. He did not have to teach in the fall of 1842, but began in spring 1843, the first classes he had taught in nine years. Early in his years at Harvard, Gray had to borrow money from his father. Soon he was able to repay his father and help his family by supplementing his income giving lectures outside of Harvard, including at the Lowell Institute. Gray was considered a weak lecturer, but because of his expert knowledge, he was highly regarded by his peers. His skills were better suited to teaching advanced rather than introductory classes. He also gained renown for his textbooks and high quality illustrations. Gray moved into what became known as the Asa Gray House in the Botanic Garden in the summer of 1844. It had been built in 1810 for William Dandridge Peck and later occupied by Thomas Nuttall. As the demands of teaching, collecting, selling specimens, taking care of the herbarium, and writing books increased and he himself was not a good illustrator, Gray found it necessary to hire a botanical illustrator – Isaac Sprague, who illustrated much of Gray's works for decades to come.By June 1848 many of the specimens from the Wilkes Expedition had been damaged or lost. Many were still not classified or published, as the mismanagement and bungling that had plagued the expedition before it ever departed continued. While on a trip to Washington, D.C., that month with his new bride, Gray was hired to study the botanical specimens for five years. This included a year in Europe, with his wife, using the facilities at the herbariums in Europe. Mr. and Mrs. Gray departed for England on June 11, 1850. They spent the summer traveling to Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Gray then set down to work on the expedition's plant sheets at the estate of botanist George Bentham, whom he had met eleven years earlier, and then with William Henry Harvey in Ireland. Gray returned to England and settled into a routine at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The couple was back in America on September 4, 1851. In the meantime, a dispute had arisen between Wilkes and the team of Torrey and Gray about the format of the books resulting from the expedition. Gray almost hired his father-in-law to break the contract. This dispute largely centered on the use of Latin and English. Wilkes wanted a literal Latin to English translation while Torrey and Gray wanted a looser one because they felt that technical English terms were equally incomprehensible to the public. Much of the work was stymied or burned in fires.In 1855, Torrey and Gray contributed a "Report on the Botany of the Expedition" to Volume II of the Reports of Explorations and Surveys to ascertain the most practicable and economical route for a railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean (known as the Pacific Railroad Surveys). The Report included a catalogue of plants collected along with 10 black and white plates for illustration.
During the late summer of 1855, Gray made his third trip to Europe. This was an emergency trip to bring his ill brother-in-law home from Paris. Gray spent only three weeks in London and Paris, and on the way back he read the newly published Géographie botanique raisonnée by Alphonse de Candolle. This was a ground-breaking book that for the first time brought together the large mass of data being collected by the expeditions of the time. The natural sciences had become highly specialized, yet this book synthesized them to explain living organisms within their environment and why plants were distributed the way they were, all upon a geologic scale. Gray instantly saw that this brought taxonomic botany into focus.Despite Gray constantly seeking collectors and people to help him with the Harvard herbarium, in the first fifteen years he was at Harvard, no graduate entered botany as a career. This changed in 1858 with the arrival of Daniel Cady Eaton, who had graduated from Yale University in 1857 and came to Harvard to study with Gray. Eaton later returned to Yale to be a botany professor and oversee its herbarium, just as Gray did at Harvard. Daniel Eaton was the grandson of Amos Eaton, whose textbooks Gray had studied during his college days. Eaton influenced the teaching style of Gray, and both required practical work of their students. Gray retained the Fisher post until 1873 while living in the Asa Gray House.In 1859 Gray was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The National Academy of Sciences was created by Congress on March 3, 1863, and he was one of the original 50 members. In 1864 Gray donated 200,000 plant specimens and 2,200 books to Harvard with the condition that the herbarium and garden be built. This effectively created the botany department at Harvard, and the Gray Herbarium was named after him. He was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1872 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1863–1873. Gray was also a regent at the Smithsonian Institution in 1874–1888 and a foreign member of the Royal Society of London in 1873.
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