NATURAL SELECTION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY 243 



having read my sketch of 1844, — honored me by thinking it 

 advisable to publish, with Mr. Wallace's excellent memoir, some 

 brief extracts from my manuscript." 



Soon after the publication of the " Origin," he writes to Lyell 

 as follows : " Now for a curious thing about my book, and then 

 I have done. In last Saturday's Gardener's Chronicle a Mr. Patrick 

 Mathew publishes a long extract from his work on ' Naval Tim- 

 ber and Arboriculture,' published in 1831, in which he briefly 

 but completely anticipates the theory of Natural Selection." A 

 few days later, in the Gardener's Chronicle, he says : " I freely 

 acknowledge that Mr. Mathew has anticipated by many years the 

 explanation which I have offered of the origin of species, under 

 the name of natural selection. I can do no more than offer an 

 apology to Mr. Mathew for my entire ignorance of this publica- 

 tion. If another edition of my work is called for, I will insert 

 to the foregoing effect." 



A few years later Darwin writes to Hooker as follows : " Talk- 

 ing of the ' Origin,' a Yankee has called my attention to a paper 

 attached to Dr. Wells's famous ' Essay on Dew,' which was read 

 in 1813 to the Royal Society, but not then printed, in which he 

 applies the principle of Natural Selection to the Races of Man. 

 So poor old Patrick Mathew is not the first, and he cannot, or 

 ought not, any longer to put on his title-page 'Discoverer of 

 the Principle of Natural Selection.' " 



In the " Historical Sketch " which is printed in all subsequent 

 editions, Darwin fulfils his promise to Mathew, and also refers 

 at length to Dr. W. C. Wells of Charleston, S.C, whose state- 

 ment is contained in "An Account of a White Female, part of 

 whose skin resembles that of a negro," afterwards (1818) pub- 

 lished as part of an appendix to his "Two Essays on Dew and 

 Single Vision." 



After remarking that negroes and mulattoes enjoy an immunity 

 from certain tropical diseases, he observes that all animals tend 

 to vary to some degree, and that agriculturalists improve their 

 domestic animals by selection, and that what is done in the latter 

 case by art, seems to be done with equal efficacy, though more 

 slowly, by nature, in the formation of varieties of mankind, fitted for 

 the country which they inhabit. Of the accidental varieties of man, 



