Abstract
Raphael Meldola (1849–1915), an industrial chemist and keen naturalist, under the influence of Darwin, brought new German studies on evolution by natural selection that appeared in the 1870s to the attention of the British scientific community. Meldola’s special interest was in mimicry among butterflies; through this he became a prominent neo-Darwinian. His wide-ranging achievements in science led to appointments as president of important professional scientific societies, and of a local club of like-minded amateurs, particularly field naturalists. This is an account of Meldola’s early scientific connections and studies related to entomology and natural selection, his contributions to the study of mimicry, and his promotion in the mid-1890s of a more theory driven approach among entomologists.
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Acknowledgments
The following are thanked for assistance: The Leo Baeck Institute London, Imperial College Archives, Writtle College Chelmsford, the Wellcome Collection, the British Library, the Science Museum Library, London, and Essex Record Office, Chelmsford. Martin Heywood in particular is thanked for his tremendous assistance with access to the archive of the Essex Field Club. I also thank Hannah Gay for kindly sharing her research into the life and times of Meldola, Roy MacLeod for information on the early years of Nature, and participants at the international workshop “The power of the margins. Construction and transformation of disciplinary identities,” held at the University of Regensburg, 4–6 December 2009, for valuable discussion.
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Travis, A.S. (2010). Raphael Meldola and the Nineteenth-Century Neo-Darwinians. In: Deichman, U., Travis, A.S. (eds) Darwinism, Philosophy, and Experimental Biology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9902-0_6
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