Ɛpsilon

To Raphael Meldola   6 June [1879]1

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

June 6th

My dear Mr. Meldola

Your best plan will be to write to “Dr. Ernst Krause Friedenstrasse. 10. II. Berlin.”

He is one of Editors, with whom I have corresponded.—2

You can say that I sent you the Journal & called your attention to the paper; but I cannot take the liberty of advising the supply of cliches.—3 He is a very obliging man. Had you not better ask for permission to translate, saying that source will be fully acknowledged.—

F. Müllers view of the mutual protection was quite new to me4

Yours sincerely | Ch Darwin

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from Raphael Meldola, 4 June 1879.
2
See letter from Raphael Meldola, 4 June 1879 and n. 1. Ernst Krause became sole editor of Kosmos in April 1879. The other editors of the first four volumes were Otto Caspari and Gustav Jäger.
3
Meldola was planning to publish a translation of Fritz Müller’s article on mimicry in butterflies (F. Müller 1879c) in the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of London (F. Müller 1879d), and hoped that woodcuts for illustrations to the article could be supplied by the publishers of the original article in Kosmos (see letter from Raphael Meldola, 4 June 1879 and n. 2).
4
In F. Müller 1879c, Müller proposed a new theory of mimicry (later known as Müllerian mimicry), in which he attempted to demonstrate how two species of distasteful butterflies could both benefit by having a similar colour pattern.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-12090,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-12090