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Darwin Correspondence Project

To E. B. Wilson   21 December 1881

[Down.]

December 21, 1881.

Dear Sir,

I thank you much for having taken so much trouble in describing fully your interesting and curious case of mimickry.1

I am in the habit of looking through many scientific Journals, and though my memory is now not nearly so good as it was, I feel pretty sure that no such case as yours has been described (amongst the nudibranch) molluscs. You perhaps know the case of a fish allied to Hippocampus, (described some years ago by Dr Günther in Proc. Zoolog. Socy.) which clings by its tail to sea-weeds, and is covered with waving filaments so as itself to look like a piece of the same sea-weed.2 The parallelism between your and Dr Gùnther’s case makes both of them the more interesting; considering how far a fish and a mollusc stand apart. It wd. be difficult for anyone to explain such cases by the direct action of the environment.— I am glad that you intend to make further observations on this mollusc, and I hope that you will give a figure and if possible a coloured figure.

With all good wishes from an old brother naturalist,

I remain, Dear Sir, | Yours faithfully, | Charles Darwin.

Footnotes

See letter from E. B. Wilson, 5 December 1881. Wilson had described a species of nudibranch mollusc that resembled the fronds of the seaweed where it lived.
Hippocampus is the genus of seahorses. Albert Günther had described and figured a species of pipefish, Phyllopteryx eques (a synonym of Phycodurus eques, the leafy seadragon), in Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London; he noted the resemblance of the fish to seaweed of a similar colour (Günther 1865, p. 328). The genera Hippocampus, Phyllopteryx, and Phycodurus are in the family Syngnathidae (pipefishes and seahorses).

Bibliography

Günther, Albert. 1865. On the pipe-fishes belonging to the genus Phyllopteryx. [Read 28 March 1865.] Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (1865): 327–8.

Summary

Thanks EBW for his curious case of mimicry in Scyllaea, which parallels that observed by Albert Günther in Hippocampus.

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-13571
From
Charles Robert Darwin
To
Edmund Beecher Wilson
Sent from
Down
Source of text
A. C. Seward ed. 1909, p. 279

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 13571,” accessed on 5 June 2025, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-13571.xml

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