Asa Gray had a profound impact on the development of scientific study in nineteenth-century America. He shaped the course of the study of botany into the twenty-first century, and his textbooks, especially the notable A Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States (1848), remain standards of the discipline. Beginning in 1834 Gray contributed copiously to such illustrious scientific journals as the American Journal of Science even as he wrote for such general readership magazines as the Nation. During his tenure at Harvard, Gray tended and nurtured the herbarium and expanded its holdings significantly by receiving and cataloguing untold numbers of plants that he collected personally or received from colleagues in the field. He is perhaps best remembered for his reviews of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), which styled Gray as the primary Darwin apologist in the United States. Through a life filled with laudable deeds, Asa Gray prepared...