42 S AIe7}iorial of George B7'-owii Goode. 



A name which should, perhaps, be mentioned in connection with this 

 is that of Doctor Wilhani Charles Wells, whom it has been the fashion 

 of late to claim as an American. It would be gratifying to be able to 

 vindicate tliis claim, for Wells was a man of whom any nation might be 

 proud. He was the originator of the generally accepted theory of the 

 origin of dew, and was also, as Darwin has shown, the first to recognize 

 and announce the theory of evolution by natural selection.' Unfortu- 

 natel}', Wells's science was not American science. We might with equal 

 propriet}' 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 Charleston, but left the country in his minority; 

 was educated at Edinburgh, and though he, as a 3'oung physician, spent 

 four years in the United States, he was permanently established in Lon- 

 don practice full)- 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 Doctor Torrey, December 

 I, 1832, he wrote: 



The truth is that species, and perhaps genera also, are forming in organized beings 

 by gradual deviations of shapes, forms, and organs taking place in the lapse of time. 

 There is a tendency to deviation and mutation in plants and animals by gradual 

 steps, at remote, irregular periods. This is a part of the great universal law of 

 perpetual mutability in everything. 



It is pleasant to remember that both Darwin and Wallace owed much 

 of their insight into the processes of nature to their American explora- 

 tions. It is also interesting to recall the closing lines, almost prophetic 

 as they seem to-day, of the Epistle to the author of the Botanic Gar- 

 den," written in 1798 by Elihu Hubbard Smith, of New York, and 

 prefixed to the American editions of The Botanic Garden: 



Where Mississippi's turbid waters glide 

 And white Missouri pours its rapid tide ; 

 Wliere vast Superior spreads its inland sea 

 And the pale tribes near icy empires sway ; 

 Where now Alaska lifts its forests rude 

 And Nootka rolls her solitary flood. 

 Hence keen incitement prompt the prying mind 

 By treacherous fears, nor palsied nor confined ; 

 Its curious search embrace the sea and shore 

 And mine and ocean, earth and air explore. 



'Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, 6th Amer. ed., p. xv. Edward S. Morse, Pro- 

 ceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, XXV,'p. 141. 

 ^Erasmus, grandfather of Charles Darwin. 



