Provenance

Purchased and accessioned, 1957. See in-house shelf list for accession dates and numbers.

Early American History Note

This Collection consists of a variety of correspondence Asa Gray carried on with fellow scientists and collectors in the United States and Europe. Asa Gray was a leading nineteenth American botanist; securing a professorship at Harvard in 1842, he became perhaps the first professional botanist in America. The topic of the letters is almost exclusively botanical in nature. The correspondence includes discussions of publications, current specimens, and fossilized flora. Although Gray carried on extensive correspondence with Charles Darwin, none of that is in this manuscript collection, although the APS does have microfilm of Asa Gray’s correspondence that contains some of this Darwin material.