Patrick Matthew (20 October 1790 – 8 June 1874) was a Scottish grain merchant, fruit farmer, forester, and landowner, who contributed to the understanding of horticulture, 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 in evolutionary adaptation and speciation (directional selection) and species constancy or stasis (stabilizing selection) in 1831 in a book called Naval Timber and Arboriculture in which he uses the phrase "the natural process of selection". He did not further publicly develop his ideas until after Darwin and Wallace published their theories of evolution by natural selection in 1859. It has been suggested that Darwin and/or Wallace had encountered Matthew's earlier work, but there is no evidence of this. After the publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin became aware of Matthew's 1831 book and subsequent editions of The Origin include an acknowledgment that Matthew "gives precisely the same view on the origin of species as that" given in the "present volume".
Biography
Patrick Matthew was born 20 October 1790 at Rome, a farm held by his father John Matthew near Scone Palace, in Perthshire. His mother was Agnes Duncan, a relative of Adam Duncan, 1st Viscount Duncan. In 1807, Matthew inherited Gourdiehill from Adam Duncan. Matthew was educated at Perth Academy and the University of Edinburgh, but did not graduate due to the death of his father. Matthew had to take over the responsibilities of managing and running the affairs of a property estate at Gourdiehill. Over the years he successfully nurtured, cultivated, and transformed much of the estate's farmland and pastures into several large orchards of apple and pear trees, numbering over 10,000. During this time, Matthew became an avid researcher of both silviculture and horticulture. His research and experience at the modest estate framed a strong base of reference to form his own opinions and theories. Matthew periodically traveled to Europe between 1807 and 1831 either on business or for his scientific studies. A trip to Paris in 1815 had to be cut short when Napoleon returned from Elba. Between 1840 and 1850, Matthew traveled extensively in what is now northern Germany. Recognizing the commercial potential of Hamburg, he bought two farms in Schleswig-Holstein. Matthew married his maternal first cousin, Christian Nicol in 1817, and they had eight children: John (born 1818), Robert (1820), Alexander (1821), Charles (1824), Euphemia (1826), Agnes (1828), James Edward (1830), and Helen Amelia (1833). Robert farmed Gourdiehill in Patrick's old age, Alexander took over the German interests; the other three sons emigrated, initially to the United States. Matthew became interested in the colonization of New Zealand and was instrumental in setting up a "Scottish New Zealand Land Company". At his urging, James and Charles Matthew emigrated to New Zealand, where they set up one of the earliest commercial orchards in Australasia using seed and seedlings from Gourdiehill. John Matthew remained in America, sending botanical tree specimens back to his father; these included the first seedlings known to have been planted in Europe of both the Giant Redwood and the Coastal Redwood. A group of trees of these species still thriving near Inchture in Perthshire comes from these seedlings. Matthew gave many more seedlings to friends, relatives and neighbors, and redwoods can be found throughout the Carse of Gowrie; these as well as some elsewhere in Scotland (e.g. at Gillies Hill near Stirling Castle) are thought to have been grown from the seedlings. His reputation as a local celebrity faded in the twentieth century, when he was remembered as a "character" who at the end of his life became convinced that "someone very dear to his heart" had become a bird, and "that was the rizzen he wouldna allow the blackies to be shot in his orchard for fear they would shute her, ye ken, although the blackies were sair on the fruit". Matthew's house, Gourdiehill, fell into disrepair in the 1970s and 1980s, and was demolished in 1990 when the grounds became a small housing estate; some of the salvaged stone was incorporated in a rock garden.
Work In managing his orchards, Patrick Matthew became familiar with the problems related to the principles of husbandry in horticulture for food production (and hence, by extension silviculture). In 1831, Matthew published On Naval Timber and Arboriculture to mixed reception. Notably, the book contains an addendum that discusses natural selection 28 years before Charles Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species.
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