6 Quotes & Sayings By Asa Gray

Asa Gray was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, on March 9, 1792. He graduated from Harvard in 1812 and then studied medicine at the University of Vermont. Dr. Gray's interest in natural history led him to botany and he became interested in entomology Read more

He served as curator of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology from 1831 until his death on March 22, 1882. Dr. Gray is best known for his work on the life histories of insects.

His collections are housed at the Harvard Museum of Natural History and at the Peabody Museum at Yale University.

1
Perhaps if zoologists would contemplate the wide variations presented by many plants of indubitably one and the same species, and the still wider diversities of long cultivated races from an original stock, they would find more than one instructive parallel to the case of the longest domesticated of all species, man. Asa Gray
2
This view, as a rounded whole and in all its essential elements, has very recently disappeared from science. It died a royal death with Agassiz.[It had formerly been held that there were no genetic connections among species.] Asa Gray
3
Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the course. Asa Gray
4
We have really, that I know of, no philosophical basis for high and low. Moreover, the vegetable kingdom does not culminate, as the animal kingdom does. It is not a kingdom, but a common-wealth; a democracy, and therefore puzzling and unaccountable from the former point of view. Asa Gray
5
It remains to consider what attitude thoughtful men and Christian believers should take respecting them, and how they stand related to beliefs of another order. Asa Gray