that "the progeny of the same parents, under great difference of circumstance, might, in several generations, even become distinct species, incapable of co-reproduction." He described this as a "circumstance-adaptive law, operating upon the slight but continued natural disposition to sport in the progeny". Matthew then quoted the opening three paragraphs from Part III of his book, Miscellaneous Matter Connected with Naval Timber: Nurseries, pages 106 to 108, on "the luxuriance and size of timber depending upon the particular variety of the species" and the need to select seed from the best individuals when growing trees. On reading this, Darwin commented in a letter to Charles Lyell dated 10 April: Darwin then wrote a letter of his own to the Gardener's Chronicle, stating, As promised, Darwin included a statement in the third (1861) and subsequent editions of On the Origin of Species, acknowledging that Matthew had anticipated "precisely the same view on the origin of species" and "clearly saw...the full force of the principle of natural selection". The statement referred to the correspondence, and quoted from a response by Matthew published in the Gardener's Chronicle. Darwin wrote that. In June 1864, after visiting his son who was farming in Schleswig-Holstein, Matthew wrote to Darwin about his pamphlet publishing five of his letters. The title page of this political pamphlet by Matthew stated his claim to be "solver of the problem of species". In a letter to Hooker (22 and 28 October 1865), Darwin commented that William Charles Wells, in an essay "read in 1813 to Royal Soc. but not printed", had applied "most distinctly the principle of N. Selection to the races of man.— So poor old Patrick Matthew, is not the first, & he cannot or ought not any longer put on his Title pages 'Discoverer of the principle of Natural Selection'!." Matthew's legacy in evolutionary studies Matthew, Darwin and Wallace are the only three people considered to have independently discovered the principle of natural selection as a mechanism for speciation (macroevolution). Others prior to Matthew had proposed natural selection as a mechanism for the generation of varieties or races within a species: James Hutton suggested the mechanism in 1794 as leading to improvement of varieties, and an 1813 paper by William Charles Wells proposed that it would form new varieties. In 1835, after Matthew's book, Edward Blyth published a description of the process as a mechanism preserving the unchanging