PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 37 



was possible. To this was due, no doubt, the speedy dissolu 

 tion of the Academy of Arts and Sciences founded in Richmond 

 in 1788.* 



A name which should, perhaps, be mentioned in connection 

 with this is that of Dr. William Charles Wells, whom it has 

 been the fashion of late to claim as an American. It would 

 be gratifying to be able to vindicate this claim, for Wells was 

 a man of whom any nation might be proud. He was the orig 

 inator of the generally-accepted theory of the origin of dew, and 

 was also, as Darwin has shown, the first to recognize and an 

 nounce the theory of evolution by natural selection, f Unfor 

 tunately Wells's science was not American science. We might 

 with equal propriety claim as American the art of James 

 Whistler, the politics of Parnell, the fiction of Alexandre 

 Dumas, the essays of Grant Allen, or the science of Rumford 

 and Le Vaillant. 



Wells was the son of an English painter, who emigrated, in 

 1753, to South Carolina, where he remained until the time of 

 the Revolution, when, with other loyalists, he returned to 

 England. He was born during his father's residence in Charles 

 ton, but left the country in his minority ; was educated at Edin 

 burgh, and though he, as a young physician, spent four years in 

 the United States, he w r as permanently established in London 

 practice fully twenty-eight years before he read his famous letter 

 before the Royal Society. 



The first American naturalist who held definite views as to 

 evolution was, undoubtedly, Rafinesque. In a letter to Dr. 

 Torrey, Dec. i, 1832, he wrote: 



" The truth is that species, and perhaps genera also, are form 

 ing in organized beings by gradual deviations of shapes, forms, 

 and organs taking place in the lapse of time. There is a tendency 



* See previous discourse, p. 98. 



t DARWIN: Origin of species, 6th Amer. Ed., p xv. MORSE: Proc. 

 Amer. Assoc. Adv. Science, xxv, p. 141. 



