On the road to the Origin with Darwin, Hooker, and Gray

Abstract

I began this paper intending to write a short essay with the title "Plant Geography in The Origin of Species." However, I find that it has evolved into something quite different. Since the summer of 1989, when the original title was chosen, I have read some unpublished letters at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Gray Herbarium of Harvard University that led me to substitute the present title. Much of the present paper now consists of excerpts from letters between Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Asa Gray (1810-1888), and Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911). They are relevant to my subject because Darwin depended upon Gray and Hooker, botanists respectively at Harvard and Kew, for much of the information on phytogeography in the Origin. I intend to pursue that theme in a later publication. I do not apologize for these long excerpts, as I think that the story is best told in the words of the protagonists. Also, they show that Darwin was not operating in a vacuum. Letters of Asa Gray was published in 1893 (J. Gray 1893), and Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1918 (L. Huxley 1918). In spite of the large numbers of letters contained in these four volumes, many of the letters that I quote from have never been published. Apparently, they were not deemed of sufficient interest to the general audience that was presumed to comprise the readers of such collections. Before they are explored, however, we must see where Gray and Hooker fit in the path leading to the publication of On the Origin of Species (C. Darwin 1859). Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) also enters our story, but more for what he is alleged to have done rather than for any early influence on Darwin. In spite of his son Leonard's statement that "Huxley was one of the few privileged to learn Darwin's argument before it was given to the world" (L. Huxley 1900:178),