Editor's Note: This story referenced in the March 2009 column "50, 100, 150 Years Ago" was originally published in the March 1959 issue of Scientific American. For more on Darwin, see our tribute on his 200th birthday. For an update on the experiments described here, see an entry in Panda's Thumb.

Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, the centenary of which we celebrate in 1959, was the fruit of 26 years of laborious accumulation of facts from nature. Others before Darwin had believed in evolution, but he alone produced a cataclysm of data in support of it. Yet there were two fundamental gaps in his chain of evidence. First, Darwin had no knowledge of the mechanism of heredity. Second, he had no visible example of evolution at work in nature.

It is a curious fact that both of these gaps could have been filled during Darwin's lifetime. Although Gregor Mendel's laws of inheritance were not discovered by the community of biologists until 1900, they had first been published in 1866. And before Darwin died in 1882, the most striking evolutionary change ever witnessed by man was taking place around him in his own country.

The change was simply this. Less than a century ago moths of certain species were characterized by their light coloration, which matched such backgrounds as light tree trunks and lichen-covered rocks, on which the moths passed the daylight hours sitting motionless. Today in many areas the same species are predominantly dark! We now call this reversal "industrial melanism."

It happens that Darwin's lifetime coincided with the first great man-made change of environment on earth. Ever since the Industrial Revolution commenced in the latter half of the 18th century, large areas of the earth's surface have been contaminated by an insidious and largely unrecognized fallout of smoke particles. In and around industrial areas the fallout is measured in tons per square mile per month; in places like Sheffield in England it may reach 50 tons or more. It is only recently that we have begun to realize how widely the lighter smoke particles are dispersed, and to what extent they affect the flora and fauna of the countryside.

In the case of the flora the smoke particles not only pollute foliage but also kill vegetative lichens on the trunks and boughs of trees. Rain washes the pollutants down the boughs and trunks until they are bare and black. In heavily polluted districts rocks and the very ground itself are darkened.

Now in England there are some 760 species of larger moths. Of these more than 70 have exchanged their light color and pattern for dark or even all-black coloration. Similar changes have ocCUlTed in the moths of industrial areas of other countries: France Germany Poland, Czechoslovakia, Canada and the U.S. So far, however, such changes have not been observed anywhere in the tropics. It is important to note here that industrial melanism has occurred only among those moths that fly at night and spend the day resting against a background such as a tree trunk.

These, then, are the facts. A profound change of color has occurred among hundreds of species of moths in industrial areas in different parts of the world. How has the change come about? What underlying laws of nature have produced it? Has it any connection with one of the normal mechanisms by which one species evolves into another?

In 1926 the British biologist Heslop Harrison reported that the industrial melanism of moths was caused by a special substance which he alleged was present in polluted air. He called this substance a "melanogen," and suggested that it was manganous sulfate or lead nitrate. Harrison claimed that when he fed foliage impregnated with these salts to the larvae of certain species of lightcolored moths, a proportion of their offspring were black. He also stated that this "induced melanism" was inherited according to the laws of Mendel.