William Charles Wells

William Charles Wells (1757 — 1817), a physician and printer, was the second son of Robert and Mary Wells.

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Wells was born in Charleston, South Carolina and was sent to school in Dumfries, Scotland at the age of eleven. After he completed his preparatory school studies he attended the University of Edinburgh.

Wells returned to Charleston in 1771 become a medical apprentice under Dr. Alexander Garden, a naturalist, physician, who himself was a pupil of Charles Alston, Director of the Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh. Between 1775 and 1780, Wells took a medical degree at Edinburgh.

When the British withdrew from Charleston in December 1782, he traveled to St. Augustine, Florida. There he published the East Florida Gazette, the first weekly newspaper printed in Florida. Other publications during the British period of Florida included the Address of the Principal Inhabitants of East Florida. He returned to England in 1784 to practice medicine.

In 1813 a paper was read before the Royal Society and published in 1818. This consisted of two essays, On Upon Single Vision with Two Eyes; The Other on Dew and An Account of a Female of the White Race... Part of Whose Skin Resembles That of a Negro...By the Late W.C. Wells…with a Memoir of His Life, Written by Himself.

In this paper, Wells had assumed that there had been evolution of humans and recognised the principle of natural selection. However he failed to develop his ideas or widely publicise them and hence Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were unaware of this work when they first published their theory in 1858. Later Darwin in the fourth edition of The Origin of Species acknowledged:

In this paper he [Wells] distinctly recognizes the principle of natural selection, and this is the first recognition which has been indicated..