In later years his fame spread wide.  He was recognised as the leader in America in his special field, and in a class with the best men of foreign lands.  He was long a correspondent and special friend of Darwin, to the spread of whose doctrines he rendered great service.  The fact that religiously he adhered to the time-honoured evangelical tenets helped much in the war which the new science was forced to wage with the odium theologicum.  The new science, it must be said, perhaps has hardly yet made sure its footing.  Are Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest clews with which we can face confidently the workings of the “roaring-gloom that weaves for God the garment we see him by”?  But no doctrine is better accepted than that in some way Evolution and not Special Creations is the scheme of the world.  Toward this acceptance Asa Gray helped powerfully, a champion always bold, humane, broad-minded.  We used to laugh about the prompter he seemed to have at the top of the light-well in the sky-light in Holden Chapel.  In a deeper sense than we knew the good man received his prompting from the clear upper sky.

A naturalist who sixty years ago had, and perhaps still has, a much wider fame than Asa Gray was Louis Agassiz.  He had come a few years before from Europe, a man in his prime, of great fame.  He was strikingly handsome, with a dome-like head under flowing black locks, large dark, mobile eyes set in features strong and comely, and with a well-proportioned stalwart frame.  At the moment his prestige was greater, perhaps, than that of any other Harvard professor.  His knowledge seemed almost boundless.  His glacial theory had put him among the geological chiefs, and as to animated nature he had ordered and systematised, from the lowest plant-forms up to the crown of creation, the human being.  Abroad we knew he was held to be an adept in the most difficult fields and now in his new environment he was pushing his investigations with passionate zeal.  But the boys found in him points on which a laugh could be hung.  As he strode homeward from his walks in the outer fields or marshes, we eyed him gingerly, for who could tell what he might have in his pockets?  Turtles, tadpoles, snakes, any old monster might be there, and queer stories prevailed of the menagerie which, hung up, and forgotten in the professor’s dressing-room, crept out and sought asylum in the beds, shoes, and hats of the household.  Before the resulting consternation, masculine and feminine, he was always apologetic.  He was on the friendliest terms with things ill-reputed, even abhorrent, and could not understand the qualms of the delicate.  He was said to have held up once, in all innocence, before a class of school-girls a wriggling snake.  The shrieks and confusion brought him to a sense of what he had done.  He apologised elaborately, the foreign peculiarity he never lost running through his confusion.  “Poor girls, I vill not do it again.  Next time I vill bring