Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/318

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Theory of Dew, by William Charles Wells, both of whom, however, left their native State and lived and wrote in England. Both Darwin and Tyndall pay hearty tribute to the ability and scientific discoveries of Wells, whose paper on the theory of natural selection furnished the groundwork for many scientists of our day. Other works of South Carolinians of the last century were the histories of Ramsay and Drayton, the military memoirs of Moultrie and the political memoirs of Drayton, the Flora Caroliniana of the botanist Walter, a few brochures of indifferent poems and some occasional plays, two of which were selected by the Dublin University Magazine as the subject of ridicule in an article on the "Beginnings of the American Drama."

The Augustan Age, if we may apply such a term to the insignificant South Carolina literature, was early in the thirties, when Hugh S. Legare, Stephen Elliott and other kindred spirits founded at Charleston the Southern Review, which, while it continued to exist, "had a more brilliant reputation than any like publication ever obtained in this country."

A little later there was a coterie of specialists in natural history, such as Bachman, the