The implication that industrial melanism could be evidence supporting Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection was noticed during his lifetime. Albert Brydges Farn (1841–1921), a British entomologist, wrote to Darwin on 18 November 1878 to discuss his observation of colour variations in the Annulet moth (then "Gnophos obscurata", now "Charissa obscurata"). He noted the existence of dark moths in peat in the New Forest, brown moths on clay and red soil in Herefordshire, and white moths on chalk cliffs in Lewes, then suggested this variation was an example of "survival of the fittest". He told Darwin that he had found dark moths on a chalk slope where the foliage had been blackened by smoke from lime kilns, and he had also heard that white moths had become less common at Lewes after lime kilns had been in operation for a few years. Darwin does not seem to have responded to this information, possibly because he thought natural selection would be a much slower process. A scientific explanation of moth colouration was only published in 1896, 14 years after Darwin's death, when J.W. Tutt explicitly linked peppered moth melanism to natural selection.