By the Late W.C. Wells…with a Memoir of his life, written by himself." Wells was clearly interested in how different races might have arisen. After some preliminary remarks on the different races of man, and of the selection of domesticated animals, he observes that:  Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were not aware of this work when they published their theory in 1858, but later Darwin acknowledged:  Credit for the first appreciation of natural selection could therefore go to Wells rather than to Edward Blyth or Patrick Matthew. The triumph is limited to the extent of being applied only to skin colour, and not, as Darwin and Wallace did, to the whole range of life. A form of the idea had already been set out by an earlier Edinburgh author, James Hutton, but in that case the effect was limited to improvement of varieties rather than the formation of new species. In the 1780s, Wells and a few others had the idea that dew and frost occurred when the ground was a few degrees colder than the air above. But they thought the cold was caused by the dew and frost, not the other way around. In the autumn of 1811 Wells took some measurements and soon came to doubt his old idea. He began serious experiments soon after and published the results in August 1814. He compared the formation of dew under varying conditions of material, location, temperature, humidity, weather, cloud cover, season, and time of day. Wells concluded that dew is a condensation of water vapor in the air caused by just the right combination of conditions involving especially temperature, temperature change, and heat conductivity of materials. Wells' inquiry into the nature of dew were widely cited in the 1830s as an outstanding example of inductive scientific inquiry. Sir John Herschel used it as the primary illustration in his "Discourse on the study of Natural Philosophy," calling the theory, "one of the most beautiful specimens we can call to mind of inductive experimental enquiry lying within a moderate compass." In 1836, the "Encyclopedia Metropolitana" reported, "We know of no work in our day which has been more universally admired than the Treatise of Dr. Wells, certainly none that practically exemplifies in a purer and better form the admirable inductive system which it was the object of Bacon to teach." John Tyndall and William Whewell praised it similarly. Most of his writings on medical subjects are contained in the second and third volumes of the "Transactions of a Society for the Promotion of Medical and Chirurgical Knowledge" 1811-12:  All sources depend ultimately on Wells' own account of his life.