Ɛpsilon

To Raphael Meldola   22 September [1877]

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.

Sept. 22d

My dear Sir

I am doubtful whether speculations in a letter ought to be published, especially after a long interval of time.1 Any fact which he states, I feel pretty sure he wd. not at all object being used by anyone.— Pray do the best you can.— I shd. grieve beyond measure to be accused of a breach of confidence.— He has lately, as I mentioned, thrown much light on the first steps in mimickry.—2

With respect to dimorphic Butterflies, those about which I have read appear at different seasons, & have been the subject of an admirable essay by Prof. Weismann. It is some little time since I read the essay & one subject drives another out of my head, but I think he explains all such cases by the direct inherited effects of temperature.3 He tried experiments. If you read German, I believe I cd find Weismanns essays & lend them to you.

In your present interesting case I really do not know what to think: it seems rather bold to attribute the 2 coloured forms to nat selection, before some advantage can be pointed out.— May not the female revert in some cases?? I do not doubt that the intermediate form cd. be eliminated as you suggest.

I wish that my opinion cd. have been of any value.—

I remain | Yours very faithfully | Ch. Darwin

Postmark: SP 23 77

1
See letters from Raphael Meldola, 13 September 1877 and n. 1, and 21 September 1877. Meldola had proposed publishing extracts from a letter written by Fritz Müller to CD in 1871 (Correspondence vol. 19, letter from Fritz Müller, 14 June 1871).
2
See letter to Raphael Meldola, 14 September 1877. CD’s copy of Müller’s paper on mimicry in Leptalis (Fritz Müller 1876a) is in the Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL. CD may also refer to Müller’s observations on Brazilian butterflies (Fritz Müller 1877a), the first part of which was published in September 1877.
3
CD’s annotated copy of August Weismann’s paper on seasonal dimorphism in butterflies (Weismann 1875) is in the Darwin Library–CUL; for Weismann’s conclusions that two forms arose as the direct effect of climatic conditions, see ibid., p. 6.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11148,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11148