Although Darwin, who along with Wallace, claimed priority for Patrick Matthew's 1831 prior-published theory of evolution by natural selection and Darwin wrote in his own defence that Matthew was an obscure writer on forest trees, we now know that Darwin's friend and correspondent John Lindley published a fallacious story that Lobb, rather than Matthew and his son John were first to introduce giant redwoods into Britain. Moreover, the journal of which Lindley was editor was in possession of a letter, penned by Patrick Matthew, proving the Matthew's priority for that. Giant redwood fame was for years wrongly attributed to another, robbing patrick Matthew and his son John of their rightful glory on the topic of trees. The consequences of Patrick Matthew not being hailed a hero, as Lobb and Lindley were in so many publications - between 1853 and 1866 - particularly when the grand enormity of these trees was brought home to the British via a display of one at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851 - must have assisted Darwin later (from 1860 onward) in so successfully portraying him to other naturalists as merely an obscure Scottish writer on forest trees. And we know that the myth stuck.
John Lindley is an interesting character in the story of Matthew, Darwin and Wallace. He was a professor of botany at the University of London and best friend of William Hooker - who was the father of Darwin's best friend Joseph Hooker (who dishonestly countersigned Darwin's letter to the Gardener's Chronicle in 1860 that contained Darwin's proven lie that no naturalist had read Matthew's original ideas on natural selection before 1860). Lindley co-authored an encyclopedia with the naturalist and polymath John Loudon. In 1832, Loudon reviewed Matthew's book and wrote that it appeared to have something original to say on 'the origin of species'. That was 26 years before Darwin and Wallace replicated Matthew's theory and claimed it as their own unique independent conceptions.
These facts are not a conspiracy theory as some today are writing to keep them down, because they are all independently verifiable . What they do represent is a great preponderance of newly unearthed evidence that the scientific community kept Matthew down by writing falsehoods and lies and attributing his unique and fundamental contributions to others.
