From Milton Wainwright
While it is excellent that Alfred Russel Wallace is at last getting his due credit alongside Charles Darwin for his work on the theory of evolution (9 November, p 48), could I make a plea for the same thing to happen to arboriculturist Patrick Matthew? Both Darwin and Wallace admitted that Matthew beat them to the idea of natural selection, a fact accepted by Darwin’s contemporaries Thomas Huxley and John Tyndall.
Despite this, Matthew is rarely mentioned in popular articles on the history of evolution, and historians also generally ignore him. If Darwin and Wallace could accept Matthew’s priority on natural selection, why can’t we lesser mortals do the same?
Sheffield, UK
