Discusses his paper on mimicry and natural selection [Land and Water 9 (1871): 321]. Believes natural selection tends to fix mimetic characters rigidly.
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The Charles Darwin Collection
The Darwin Correspondence Project is publishing letters written by and to the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Complete transcripts of letters are being made available through the Project’s website (www.darwinproject.ac.uk) after publication in the ongoing print edition of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge University Press 1985–). Metadata and summaries of all known letters (c. 15,000) appear in Ɛpsilon, and the full texts of available letters can also be searched, with links to the full texts.
Discusses his paper on mimicry and natural selection [Land and Water 9 (1871): 321]. Believes natural selection tends to fix mimetic characters rigidly.
Discusses the problems of mimicry as related to natural selection; the general variability of colour as a character; and the conditions necessary for natural selection to fix firmly a character.
Encloses a Fritz Müller letter speculating that organisms respond to certain colours because of the prevalence of those colours in their environment.
Discusses the roles of natural and sexual selection in producing mimicry, and the problem of explaining the cause of the first mimetic variation; considers the ideas of A. R. Wallace and Fritz Müller on this problem.
Invites RM to keep some specimens as long as he wishes.
Recalls vaguely the mention of a butterfly species in which the male alone is mimetic.