Ɛpsilon

From Raphael Meldola   31 January 1882

21, John Street, | Bedford Row. W.C.

Jan. 31/82

My dear Mr. Darwin,

Herewith I send the proof & MSS. of the Prefatory Notice which you were good enough to write for my edition of Weismann’s “Studies”.1 If on reading this preface, which you wrote some two years ago, you see any way of enlarging it, I should be most grateful & my publishers have urged me to ask you to do so, as it would considerably enhance the value of the book. So far the work has been a complete failure I hear from a financial point of view, but for this I was of course prepared.

I am very much obliged to you for the loan of Weismann’s paper on the Daphnids— I must beg leave to keep it for some time longer as I am still working at Alternation of Generations.2

Yours very truly, | R. Meldola.

1
In 1880, CD had written a short prefatory notice for Meldola’s translation of August Weismann’s Studien zur Descendenz-Theorie (Weismann 1875–6); the translation was published in three parts between 1880 and 1882 (Weismann 1880–2).
2
CD had sent Weismann’s paper ‘Ueber die Schmuckfarben der Daphnoiden’ (On the decorative colours of daphnids; Weismann 1878); see letter from Raphael Meldola, 11 January 1882 and nn. 1 and 3.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13652,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13652