Dallas from "Wiegmann's Archiv," 1863 (see also "Facts and Arguments for Darwin," passim, translated by W.S. Dallas: London, 1869).) This seems to me the most interesting discovery in embryology which has been made for years.
I am much obliged to you for telling me a little of your plans for the future; what a strange, but to my taste interesting life you will lead when you retire to your estate on the Itajahy!
You refer in your letter to the facts which Agassiz is collecting, against our views, on the Amazons. Though he has done so much for science, he seems to me so wild and paradoxical in all his views that I cannot regard his opinions as of any value.
LETTER 189. TO A.R. WALLACE. Down, January 22nd, 1866.
I thank you for your paper on pigeons (189/1. "On the Pigeons of the Malay Archipelago" (The "Ibis," October, 1865). Mr. Wallace points out (page 366) that "the most striking superabundance of pigeons, as well as of parrots, is confined to the Australo-Malayan sub-region in which...the forest-haunting and fruit-eating mammals, such as monkeys and squirrels, are totally absent." He points out also that monkeys are "exceedingly destructive to eggs and young birds."), which interested me, as everything that you write does. Who would ever have dreamed that monkeys influenced the distribution of pigeons and parrots! But I have had a still higher satisfaction, for I finished your paper yesterday in the "Linnean Transactions." (189/2. "Linn. Soc. Trans." XXV.: a paper on the geographical distribution and variability of the Malayan Papilionidae.) It is admirably done. I cannot conceive that the most firm believer in species could read it without being staggered. Such papers will make many more converts among naturalists than long-winded books such as I shall write if I have strength. I have been particularly struck with your remarks on dimorphism; but I cannot quite understand one point (page 22), (189/3. The passage referred to in this letter as needing further explanation is the following: "The last six cases of mimicry are especially instructive, because they seem to indicate one of the processes by which dimorphic forms have been produced. When, as in these cases, one sex differs much from the other, and varies greatly itself, it may happen that individual variations will occasionally occur, having a distant resemblance to groups which are the objects of mimicry, and which it is therefore advantageous to resemble. Such a variety will have a better chance of preservation; the individuals possessing it will be multiplied; and their accidental likeness to the favoured group will be rendered permanent by hereditary transmission, and each successive variation which increases the resemblance being preserved, and all variations departing from the favoured type having less chance of preservation, there will in time result those singular cases of two or more isolated and fixed forms bound together by that intimate relationship which constitutes them the sexes of a single species. The reason why the females are more subject to this kind of modification than the males is, probably, that their slower flight, when laden with eggs, and their exposure to attack while in the act of depositing their eggs upon leaves, render it especially advantageous for them to have some additional protection. This they at once obtain by acquiring a resemblance to other species which, from whatever cause, enjoy a comparative immunity from persecution." Mr. Wallace has been good enough to give us the following note on the above passage: "The above quotation deals solely with the question of how certain females of the polymorphic species (Papilio Memnon, P. Pammon, and others) have been so modified as to mimic species of a quite distinct section of the genus; but it does not attempt to explain why or how the other very variable types of female arose, and this was Darwin's difficulty. As the letter I wrote in reply is lost, and as it is rather difficult to explain the matter clearly without reference to the coloured figures, I must go into some little detail, and give now what was probably the explanation I gave at the time.