BATES'S CLASSICAL MEMOIR 123 



theory. My kind friend has given that copy to 

 me ; it bears the inscription : 



Only a year and a half after the publication 

 of the Origin, we find that Darwin wrote to Bates 

 on the subject which was to provide such striking 

 evidence of the truth of Natural Selection : 



' I am glad to hear that you have specially attended to 

 " mimetic" analogies a most curious subject : I hope you 

 publish on it. I have for a long time wished to know 

 whether what Dr. Collingwood asserts is true that the 

 most striking cases generally occur between insects inhabit- 

 ing the same country.' J 



The next letter, written about six months 

 later, reveals the remarkable fact that the illus- 

 trious naturalist who had anticipated Edward 

 Forbes in the explanation of arctic forms on 

 alpine heights, 2 had also anticipated H. W. Bates 

 in the theory of Mimicry : 



' What a capital paper yours will be on mimetic re- 



1 The letter is dated April 4, 1861. More Letters, i. 183. 



2 ' I was forestalled in only one important point, which my 

 vanity has always made me regret, namely, the explanation by 

 means of the Glacial period of the presence of the same species 

 of plants and of some few animals on distant mountain summits 

 and in the arctic regions. This view pleased me so much that 

 I wrote it out in extenso, and I believe that it was read by Hooker 

 some years before E. Forbes published his celebrated memoir on 

 the subject. In the very few points in which we differed, I still 

 think that I was in the light. I have never, of course, alluded 

 in print to my having independently worked out this view.' 

 Autobiography in Life and Letters, i. 88. 



