To Raphael Meldola   22 October [1877]1

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

Oct 22d

My dear Sir

I send Kosmos by this Post.—2 Prof. Weismann’s address is Freiburg.—3 I shd. think he wd be glad of Translation & wd. probably arrange for stereotypes of Plates.— You cd. say as an introduction that I had lent you his book.— To find a publisher will be perhaps a difficulty. Should it be translated I must beg you to get another copy, as I cannot spare mine for such a length of time.—4

Wallace sent me his article & I was quite dissatisfied with it.— To explain a peacocks tail by vital activity seems to me mere verbiage—a mere metaphysical principle.—5

My dear Sir | Yours faithfully | Ch. Darwin

It will be a public benefit to bring out a Translation.—

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from Raphael Meldola, 20 October 1877.
2
CD had offered to lend Meldola a paper published in Kosmos by Fritz Müller on sexual selection in butterflies (see letter to Raphael Meldola, 19 October [1877] and n. 1).
3
Meldola wished to write to August Weismann to ask permission to translate his Studien zur Descendenz-Theorie (Weismann 1875 and 1876; see letter from Raphael Meldola, 20 October 1877 and n. 2).
4
CD’s annotated copies of Weismann 1875 and 1876 are in the Darwin Library–CUL.
5
CD had already expressed his view to Alfred Russel Wallace after reading Wallace’s paper criticising sexual selection (A. R. Wallace 1877; see letter to A. R. Wallace, 31 August 1877).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

1.2 stereotypes] altered from ‘steriotypes’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11197,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11197