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From Raphael Meldola   11 January 1882

The Epping Forest and County of Essex | Naturalists’ Field Club. | 21 John Street, | Bedford Row, W.C.

Jan. 11/82

My dear Mr. Darwin,

I hope you will kindly excuse a little trouble which I am about to put you to in asking you to be so good as to lend me Weismann’s pamphlet on the Daphniidæ which he published some 2 or 3 years ago & which you were so kind as to lend me on a former occasion.1 I should not thus presume to trespass upon that kindness which you always manifest in giving assistance where wanted were it not that Dr. Weismann is just now in Naples & I have no other means of getting his paper.2 I am preparing an essay on the very difficult subject of “Alternation of Generations” by way of an annual address to this Club— it is for this purpose that I require to refer to this paper.3 I would willingly call & fetch the paper any Saturday afternoon or Sunday if you do not like to trust it through the post.

I have just been reading your really charming work on the earthworm—4 what important agents in bringing about changes in surface geology these little creatures appear to be!

Our Club, as you are no doubt aware, has sustained a very heavy loss by the death of Sir Antonio Brady. We are going to publish a memoir of him in our next part of Transactions.5 I hope you received & approve of our last part.6

Yours very faithfully, | R. Meldola.

P.S. Weismann’s “Studies” were long ago completed so far as I am concerned. They are dreadfully slow in printing the last part. I am daily expecting the proof of your Prefatory Notice.7

1
August Weismann’s paper ‘Ueber die Schmuckfarben der Daphnoiden’ (On the decorative colours of daphnids; Weismann 1878) had focused on the bright spots of colour present in some species of water fleas, and whether these occurred in both sexual and parthenogenetic broods (for more on Weismann’s research in this area, see Churchill 2015, pp. 134–6). CD’s copy of the paper is in the Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL. Meldola had previously borrowed the paper from CD (see Correspondence vol. 26, letter from Raphael Meldola, 13 June 1878).
2
Weismann had gone on a trip to Naples and Sicily (Churchill 2015, p. 180).
3
Meldola’s talk, ‘The phenomena of cyclical propagation in the animal kingdom’, was delivered to the Epping Forest and County of Essex Naturalists’ Field Club on 28 January 1882; the full text of the talk was not published, but see Meldola 1882, p. 196. Meldola had introduced the term ‘cyclical propagation’ to replace ‘alternation of generations’.
4
Earthworms.
5
Antonio Brady had died on 12 December 1881; the memoir on him appeared in Transactions of the Essex Field Club 3 (1882–3): 94–101.
6
CD had been elected an honorary member of the Epping Forest and County of Essex Naturalists’ Field Club when it was formed in 1880 (see Correspondence vol. 28, letter from William Cole, 14 February 1880), and received their Transactions.
7
Meldola’s translation of August Weismann’s Studien zur Descendenz-Theorie (Weismann 1875–6) was published in three parts between 1880 and 1882 (Weismann 1880–2). In 1880, CD had written a short prefatory notice for Meldola’s translation, to be published when the final part was in press.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13609,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13609