My health is excellent. Let us hope the same for you, and offer my best wishes for the year 1880.
Dr. Gray delivered in the winter of 1880 two lectures to the theological school of Yale College, on Natural Science and Religion.
They were long and carefully thought out, and he had great pleasure in speaking to an audience who followed him so closely, and evidently with such attentive sympathy.
He also enjoyed very much reading them, before delivery, to his friend Dr. O. W. Holmes, in Boston.
DEAR FRIEND,--We go Monday night on to Washington, leaving here at five P.M. My lectures are fixed for February 5 and 6, so that I shall return from Washington and go on specially to New Haven.
I expect to be at home the last week of the month, but perhaps not on Monday, and I should wish to see you and read my second lecture, which is dragging its slow length along!...
I have this moment received and read from Newman Smyth a flattering note, and a copy of his article in the “Advance.” A very good one it is, and his own thoughts are noteworthy and to the point.
President Gilman of the Johns Hopkins sent me a very admiring letter, in which he urges a student’s edition, on thinner paper and paper covers, which he wants to subscribe for. I shall send it to the publisher before long.
I am amused at Professor ----’s substitution of demiurgism for evolution, reprinted in the “Independent,” and at the coolness with which the professor proclaims that a hypothesis which he thinks is good for nothing else may be good to put against evolutionism.
Darwin has sent me advance sheets of his book on Advantage of Crosses (not moral but floral crosses, and not crosses made of flowers, but those made by insects and winds for the benefit of flowers), and I see much in it which you will enjoy. I am too full of work to use it next week, and if you tell me you will come Monday and take it, I will lend it to you for that week.
Professor Fisher has sent me an admirable sermon on “The Folly of Atheism.” Have you seen it?
... I would change a word in paragraph seven. If by proof you mean demonstration of its truth, I remark that rational explanation of the phenomena, so far as known, does not prove an hypothesis. Two different hypotheses may do that; and it may long be impossible to get a crucial test.