Weekly Meeting

Patrick Matthew (20 October 1790 – 8 June 1874) was a Scottish landowner and fruit farmer, who contributed to understanding ofhorticulture, silviculture, and agriculture in general, with a focus on maintaining the British navy and feeding new colonies. He published the basic concept of natural selection as a mechanism of evolution in an appendix to his 1831 book On Naval Timber and Arboriculture, but failed to develop or publicise his ideas concerning natural selection. Consequently, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, he and Alfred Russel Wallace were regarded by their scientific peers as having originated (independently of each other) the theory of evolution by natural selection; it has been suggested that Darwin and/or Wallace had encountered Matthew's earlier work, but there is no firm evidence of this. After the publication of On the Origin of Species, Matthew contacted Darwin, who in subsequent editions of the book acknowledged that the principle of natural selection had been anticipated by Matthew's brief statement in the appendix of his 1831 work.