HISTORICAL SKETCH. xvii 



climates. I am indebted to Mr. Eowley, of the United 

 States, for having called my attention, through Mr. 

 Brace, to the above passage in Dr. Well's work. 



The Hon. and Eev. W. Herbert, afterwards Dean of 

 Manchester, in the fourth volume of the ' Horticultural 

 Transactions,' 1822, and in his work on the 'Amaryl- 

 lidacese ' (1837, pp. 19, 339), declares that " horticultural 

 experiments have established, beyond the possibility of 

 refutation, that botanical species are only a higher and 

 more permanent class of varieties." He extends the 

 same view to animals. The Dean believes that single 

 species of each genus were created, in an originally 

 highly plastic condition, and that these have produced, 

 chiefly by intercrossing, but likewise by variation, all 

 our existing species. 



In 1826 Professor Grant, in the concluding para- 

 graph in his well-known paper (' Edinburgh Philosophi- 

 cal Journal,' vol. xiv. p. 283) on the Spongilla, clearly 

 declares his belief that species are descended from other 

 species, and that they become improved in the course of 

 modification. This same view was given in his 55th 

 Lecture, published in the ' Lancet ' in 1834. 



In 1831 Mr. Patrick Matthew published his work on 

 'Naval Timber and Arboriculture,' in which he gives 

 precisely the same view on the origin of species as that 

 (presently to be alluded to) propounded by Mr. Wallace 

 and myself in the 'Linnean Journal,' and as that en- 

 larged in the present volume. Unfortunately the view 

 was given by Mr. Matthew very briefly in scattered 

 passages in an Appendix to a work on a different sub- 

 ject, so that it remained unnoticed until Mr. Matthew 

 himself drew attention to it in the ' Gardener's 

 Chronicle,' on April 7th, 1860. The differences of Mr. 

 3 



