I am sufficiently convinced already that the members of a profession know their own calling better than anyone else can know it.
From Asa Gray
Indeed upon much that may have to say, I expect rather the charitable judgment than the full assent of those whose approbation I could most wish to win.
I take it for granted that you do not wish to hear an echo from the pulpit nor from the theological class-room.
I accept extinction as best explaining disjoined species. I see that the same cause must have reduced many species of great range to small, and that it may have reduced large genera to so small, and of families.
Why is it not just as likely that there were as many small general nearly at first as now, and as great a disproportion in the number of their species?
Is it philosophical, is it quite allowable, to assume without evidence from fossil plants that the family or any of the genera was once larger and wide spread? and occupied a continuous area?
Your candor is worth everything to your cause. It is refreshing to find a person with a new theory who frankly confesses that he finds difficulties, insurmountable, at least for the present.
I know some people who never have any difficulties to speak of. The moment I understood your premisses, I felt sure you had a real foundation to hold on.
We may take it to be the accepted idea that the Mosaic books were not handed down to us for our instruction in scientific knowledge, and that it is our duty to ground our scientific beliefs upon observation and inference, unmixed with considerations of a different order.
I proceed with the proper subject of this discourse; namely, the further changes in scientific belief, which have occurred within my own recollection, even since the time when I first aspired to authorship, now forty- five years ago.
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