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 term "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 hard 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 ''The Origin'' include an acknowledgment that Matthew "gives precisely the same view on the origin of species as that" given in the "present volume".
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