From Raphael Meldola   20 October 1877

Office, | 50, Old Broad Street, | E.C. | Atlas Works, | Hackney Wick, | London, E.

Oct. 20th. 1877

My dear Sir,

I am very much obliged for your kind offer to let me read the article on sexual selec. in butterflies in the ‘Kosmos’ & I shall have much pleasure in doing so if you will kindly forward the paper to 21 John St B— Row.1 I will return as soon as read.

I am very much interested with Weismann’s essays & think them well worth giving to the English Nat. Hist. public.2 My father who is a fair German scholar would be willing to undertake the translation (as my time is very much absorbed) & I would be responsible for the editing.3 Do you think the Author would object to their being translated? Can you inform me where I can communicate with the Dr?

I suppose you have read Mr. Wallace’s articles in Macmillan’s Mag. on the colours of animals & plants.4 I do not think that he has advanced matters much in this direction. With regard to plants he teaches nothing new. His theory of colour &c in animals is in my opinion not so scientific as your sexual selec. inasmuch as he substitutes for this agency a kind of vague & totally unexplained correlation between vital energy & development of colour, ornament &c5

This is of course entirely between ourselves, | Yours sincerely, | R. Meldola.

CD annotations

Top of letter: ‘Return my Copy’ pencil
1
See letter to Raphael Meldola, 19 October [1877] and n. 1. The address 21 John Street, Bedford Row, was that of his father, Samuel Meldola (Post Office London directory 1876).
2
Meldola’s translation of August Weismann’s Studien zur Descendenz-Theorie (Weismann 1875 and 1876) was published as Studies in the theory of descent in 1882 (Weismann 1882). CD wrote a two-page preface to the translation.
3
Meldola’s father was a printer in London.
4
Alfred Russel Wallace’s articles were published in the September and October issues of Macmillan’s Magazine (A. R. Wallace 1877).
5
Wallace had sent CD a copy of his September article (see letter to A. R. Wallace, 31 August 1877, and letter from A. R. Wallace, 3 September 1877); Wallace had long criticised CD’s theory of sexual selection as applied to colour and ornamentation (see letter from A. R. Wallace, 23 July 1877 and n. 2).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11192,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11192