Pioneer of Natural Selection: William Charles Wells of Charleston

William Charles Wells is one of those historical figures who should be better known than he is. He was the first person to propose the theory of natural selection, decades before Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. He was also the first to explain why dew forms on grass.

Wells was born in Charleston [then Charlestown], South Carolina in 1757 of Scottish immigrant parents. His father, Robert Wells, established a successful business as a printer, bookseller, and newspaper publisher in the town. [Image: Wells Shop, 71 Tradd Street]

When he was eleven, William's parents sent him to Scotland for education. Upon completion of his preparatory studies two years later, he attended Edinburgh University for a year. 

During his time in Scotland he made several lifelong friendships. One of his closest friends was David Hume, nephew of the famous philosopher of the same name. It is very likely he met the philosopher himself or at least became familiar with his ideas. 

Wells returned to Charleston in 1771 and started a medical apprenticeship under Dr. Alexander Garden, one of the most respected physicians in the town. Garden was also a respected naturalist for whom Linnaeus named the gardenia. 

In 1775, Wells left Charleston abruptly for London. The move was prompted by the beginning of the American War for Independence. He had refused to sign a document calling for armed resistance to the British government. His father, an ardent Loyalist, had already gone to London earlier that year.

The following year he enrolled again at the University of Edinburgh and studied medicine. In 1778 he returned to London and took a course of lectures under the famed anatomist William Hunter. He was also accepted as a surgeon's pupil at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. 

In 1779 he enlisted as a surgeon in a Scottish regiment in the Netherlands. According to his own account he resigned his commission due to ill-treatment by his commanding officer. He challenged the officer to a duel, but the officer refused to respond.

Wells then enrolled in the University of Leiden and prepared a dissertation, On Cold. He submitted it to Edinburgh in 1780 and received his M.D.

In May 1780, the British captured Charleston. Wells returned early in 1781 to manage his family's affairs there. For more than a year he wore many hats: he worked as a printer, bookseller, merchant, and a trustee for the properties of some of his father's friends. He also served in the Loyalist militia. 

When the British evacuated Charleston in December 1782, Wells removed to St. Augustine, where he established the first weekly newspaper in Florida, The East Florida Gazette. The paper did not last long, however. The British returned Florida to Spain in 1784 as part of the treaty ending the American War for Independence. [Image: one of the surviving issues of the The East Florida Gazette

From Florida, Wells returned to London and lived near or with his parents. His father Robert had prospered there initially as a printer on Fleet Street, but fell into heavy debt before his death in 1794.  

After returning to London, Wells devoted himself to medical and scientific pursuits. He became one of the physicians to the charitable Finsbury Dispensary in 1790 and joined the medical staff of St. Thomas's Hospital in 1798 as an Assistant Physician. 

Two years later, he was appointed Physician at St. Thomas. He never prospered particularly in medicine, however, a fact he attributed in part to his exclusion from the prestigious Royal College of Physicians. Membership was then effectively restricted to M.D.s from Oxford and Cambridge.

For several years in the early 1800s he campaigned unsuccessfully to open the membership of College to graduates of all recognized medical schools. 

In 1793 his intellectual reputation was sufficient to get him elected to the Royal Society of London, one of the world's most prestigious scientific associations. He was later elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 

After his return to London, he lived for a time at Salisbury Square, Fleet Street. He later moved to Sergeants Inn, a short distance away on the same street. [Image: Sergeants Inn, Fleet Street, where Wells lived in his later years. It is currently a boutique hotel] 

Wells made several important contributions to medical and scientific research. In 1814 the Royal Society awarded Wells the Rumford Medal for his groundbreaking Essay on Dew. Through painstaking research on many a chilly morning, he was the first to establish that the cause of dew formation was condensation of water under specific conditions of temperature, temperature change, and the conductivity of materials.  

Later Victorian scientists, including Sir John Herschel and John Tyndall, praised Wells' Essay on Dew as a model of inductive method. Herschel used it as the main example of the method in his Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, calling it "beautiful." 

In 1813 Wells presented a paper to the Royal Society entitled "Some observations on the causes of the differences of color and form between the white and negro races of men." His object was to try to explain the origins of the human "races," which he equated with "varieties." 

In the course of the presentation, he stated the principle of natural selection 45 years before Darwin and Wallace.  After discussing the artificial selection of domestic breeding of animals, he goes on to propose that the different varieties of humankind are the result of selection by nature: 

"[What was done for animals artificially] seems to be done with equal efficiency, 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, which would occur among the first scattered inhabitants, some would be better fitted than the others to bear the diseases of the country. This race would multiply while the others would decrease, and as the darkest would be best fitted for the [African] climate, at length they would become the most prevalent, if not the only race."

The paper was published in 1818, but Darwin and Wallace were not aware of it when they presented their joint paper on natural selection in 1858. After Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, an American clergyman alerted him to the existence of Wells' work.

In later editions, Darwin acknowledged that Wells was likely the first person to have hit upon the principle of natural selection, although he noted correctly that Wells had limited it to humans and "certain characters alone," not the entire spectrum of life. Ironically, Darwin himself did not directly apply natural selection to humans in The Origin of Species. That came later, in The Descent of Man (1871). 

Wells died of heart disease in 1817. He left behind a brief memoir of his life. It was published the following year, along with his Essay on Dew and the paper in which he proposed the idea of natural selection.

He is buried next to his parents at St. Bride's, Fleet Street, which was known as "The Printer's Church" because of the concentration of printing establishments on Fleet Street. A memorial his sister Louisa erected to Wells and their parents was destroyed by German bombs in World War II.

Louisa Wells Aikman was herself a music score collector and author. She was banished from South Carolina as a Loyalist in 1778. She recorded her experiences in A Voyage from South Carolina to London (London, 1779). Another of Wells' sisters, Helena, was the author of several books, including two novels. Wells never married and had no known children. 

Sources: The main source for Wells' life is his short memoir mentioned above.   

An overview of Well's life and a detailed analysis of his work can be found in N.J. Wade, Destined for Distinguished Oblivion: the Scientific Vision of William Charles Wells (New York: Springer, 2003)

  

 

"The Atheist is Dying!"

In August 1776 a noted Scots philosopher lay dying of abdominal cancer in his home in Edinburgh. As news spread of his imminent demise, crowds gathered in the street outside his house, crying "The Atheist is dying! The Atheist is dying!" 

David Hume, for that was his name, was a genial, kindly man whose written works had made him many admirers and more enemies. One of the great philosophical skeptics, Hume had undermined many conventional beliefs, including the then popular "argument from design" used to prove God's existence. 

In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he argued that it was just as likely that the world had been designed by many gods or none at all, by an incompetent god, an infant god, even an animal or vegetable god, as by the omnipotent deity of the Bible. There was no irrefutable evidence for any of these possibilities. (Image: David Hume, 1754, by Allan Ramsay)

In suggesting the possibility that the world and its lifeforms could have been the result of accident rather than intelligent design, Hume anticipated Darwin's principle of natural selection. 

Hume had aroused the ire of the Presbyterian clergy with his arguments against miracles, the afterlife, and the impossibility of proving the existence or nature of God. They had even considered bringing charges of infidelity against him. 

Many modern critics claim that Hume was an agnostic but contemporaries considered him an atheist, or at least anti-Christian. He argued all religion arose from fear, "from a dread of the unknown." He declared that polytheism had some advantages over monotheism from a societal point of view.

He was fond of relating that "the best theologian he had ever met was an old Edinburgh fishwife who, having recognized him as Hume the atheist, refused to pull him out of the bog into which he had fallen until he declared he was a Christian and repeated the Lord's Prayer." 

James Boswell, who later wrote the acclaimed Life of Dr. Johnson, visited Hume a few weeks before his death. The much younger Boswell recorded an account of their exchange. (Image: James Boswell, 1765, by George Willison)

"I found him alone, in a reclining posture in his drawing room. He was lean, ghastly, and of an earthy appearance. He was quite different from the plump figure which he used to present. He seemed to be placid, even cheerful. He said he was just approaching to his end." (Image: David Hume, 1766, by Allan Ramsay)

Boswell, a conventional Christian with a robust libido, hoped to get Hume to confess his faith. Hume replied that he had long ago rejected belief in any religion, and that "the morality of every religion was bad." He went on to say that "when he heard that a man was religious, he concluded that he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men who were religious."

Boswell asked Hume if he persisted in rejecting belief in an afterlife, with death staring him in the face. Hume answered, "it was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist forever." Boswell left him "with impressions that disturbed me for some time." 

Hume died in his home on St Andrews Square, New Town, on August 25, 1776. He was buried at his request in a tomb on nearby Calton Hill. He wished it to be inscribed with only his name and dates. 

The tomb, designed by his friend the architect Robert Adam, sits next to a statue of Abraham Lincoln, memorializing the sacrifices of Scottish soldiers who fought for the Union in the American Civil War.

 

Atheist or not, Hume is today a celebrated figure in Scotland and globally. Since 1995, a statue of Hume in classical garb has resided on the Royal Mile, across from St. Giles Cathedral. I suspect he would have appreciated the irony of that. 

It has become a custom for visitors to rub his big toe on the right foot for good luck, which is why the original bronze shows through. That is also ironical, because Hume of course rejected belief in luck as ignorant superstition. I touched the toe myself, however, just in case.

Image: Edinburgh High Street, with the Hume Statue and St. Giles.

Further Reading: Charles Weiss and Frederick Pottle, eds., Boswell in Extremes, 1776-1778 (London, 1970)

How the Gardenia Got its Name

The gardenia is a familiar, fragrant flowering plant with whitish flowers. Obviously, it derived its Latin name from the word “garden,” but it was not named for a place full of plants, but a physician and naturalist who lived in Charleston, South Carolina during the eighteenth century.

Alexander Garden was born in Birse, Aberdeenshire, Scotland in 1730. He studied at Aberdeen and Edinburgh Universities, receiving an MD from the latter school. He served as a surgeon in the British navy for several years, but resigned, he said, because he could not overcome sea sickness. A lung complaint, probably tuberculosis, may also have played a part in his decision. [Image: Alexander Garden]

He emigrated to warmer South Carolina in 1752 in hopes of improving his health and income. In the latter goal, at least, he succeeded. South Carolina was not only the wealthiest British North American colony, it was also the unhealthiest. Garden married a wealthy local heiress, Elizabeth Peronneau, and soon had a flourishing practice in the provincial capital, Charlestown). (Image: Charlestown harbor, 1760s)

By the time of the American Revolution Garden had become the richest physician in the colony, and had bought a plantation in nearby Goose Creek, which he named Otranto.

His passion, however was natural history, initially botany, but later zoology. In South Carolina, Garden collected specimens of many new species and sent them to European naturalists, especially John Ellis of London. As a reward, Ellis urged the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus to name a new genus or species after Garden. 

Linnaeus had invented the modern system of biological classification, and currently had the final say on naming. Garden and Linnaeus also opened a correspondence that lasted for several years. (Image: Linnaeus)

In 1757, Ellis failed to convince Linnaeus to name a South Carolina plant after Garden, the Calycanthus floridus (Sweet Shrub, below). 

The next year, Ellis first set eyes on an attractive, fragrant plant that a ship had recently brought from South Africa. He soon began a campaign to get Linnaeus to name it after Garden. Linnaeus initially refused, saying he preferred to give the name to a plant discovered by Garden himself, or another species. In 1760, Linnaeus reluctantly agreed to the name gardenia, giving Garden what Ellis called a “Species of Eternity.” 

The honor impressed many of Garden’s acquaintances in Charlestown, but one medical colleague was apparently jealous. Dr. Louis Mottet is alleged to have scoffed that he had discovered a very beautiful local plant, and named it “Lucia” after his cook, Lucy.

In the following years, Garden continued to make contributions to natural history, including the discovery of new species of amphibians and fish. (Image: Siren lacertina)

In 1773, Garden was elected to membership of the Royal Society of London, Britain’s most prestigious scientific organization. Among those who nominated him were Ellis and Benjamin Franklin. During these years Garden became a close friend of many leading figures of South Carolina, among them Henry Laurens, later president of the Continental Congress. Garden mentored and adored Laurens’ son John Laurens, who served as a  Patriot officer during the American Revolution, and was killed in one of its last engagements (Aug. 1782).

The War for Independence proved disastrous for Garden. He tried, unsuccessfully, to remain neutral. His family divided. During the British occupation of Charleston (1780-82), his daughter Harriette married a British officer. His son Alex joined the Continental Army, rising to the rank of major.

In 1782, the South Carolina State Assembly banished Garden as a Loyalist for having signed a memorial congratulating Lord Cornwallis on his victory at the Battle of Camden. The government of South Carolina confiscated most of his property, although Alex was allowed to keep Otranto. (Image: Battle of Camden)

When the British evacuated Charleston in December 1782, Garden, his wife, and younger daughter Juliette went into exile in London. He died there in 1791, most likely of tuberculosis. During his time in London, he was an active member of the Royal Society, and was elected vice-president.

Further reading:

Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, Alexander Garden of Charles Town (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969)

James Edward Smith, A Selection of the Correspondence of Linnaeus and Other Naturalists (2 vols., London, 1821)