Scope and Content Note
The papers of Asa Gray (1810-1888), botanist and professor at Harvard College from 1842 to 1873, span the years 1840-1859 and consist chiefly of letters from Gray and his wife, Jane Loring Gray, to botanist Elizabeth Carrington Morris and her sister, Margaretta Hare Morris, a naturalist. Gray became an influential botanical taxonomist in America after he introduced a new system of classification based on biological similarity. Most of the correspondence between Gray and the Morris sisters is scientific and technical in nature and concerns botany and the natural sciences. Also included are letters to the Morrises from other prominent American scientists, including Louis Agassiz, Samuel Stehman Halderman, Thaddeus William Harris, and Benjamin Silliman, together with two undated articles possibly by the entomologist Thomas Say for the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.