author
Scots New Zealand Land Company
A Scottish landowner, orchardist, and social thinker, he wrote about forestry, farming, and emigration with a practical, argumentative style. He is remembered today both for his colonial-era writings, including this prospectus, and for an early statement of ideas later associated with natural selection.
1 Audiobook
Prospectus of the Scots New Zealand Land Company
by Scots New Zealand Land Company, Patrick Matthew
About the author
Born in Scotland in 1790, Patrick Matthew was a landowner, fruit grower, and writer whose interests ranged across agriculture, forestry, and public affairs. His work often mixed practical observation with big social questions, which gives his writing an energetic, opinionated character.
Matthew wrote Prospectus of the Scots New Zealand Land Company in the context of nineteenth-century emigration and colonization schemes. The book reflects the ambitions and assumptions of its time, presenting New Zealand settlement as both an economic opportunity and a social project.
He is now best known for On Naval Timber and Arboriculture (1831), a book in which he outlined ideas that were later recognized as an early expression of natural selection. He died in 1874, but his name continues to surface in histories of science as well as in studies of nineteenth-century agriculture and empire.