To Henry Doubleday 20 March [1868]1
4. Chester Place | Regents Park | N.W. | (address till April. 1)
March. 20
My dear Sir
You have been so very kind in offering to aid me that I apply once again.—2 I was told at B. Mus. that you had made observations on Anobium tesselatum & had sent living specimens there. I was told that you had stated (& Mr F. Smith in consequence observed the same fact) that the ticking sound is a sexual call.3 Is it made first or principally by the male, & answered by the female? The answering by the female seems to make the case different from the music of the Orthoptera & Homoptera.4
I am interested by this case, as it is the first of which I have heard of noises emitted by Coleoptera for sexual purposes. Is the noise made by the thorax or head hitting against the wood?
I think that I mentioned to you that I inferred from a letter from Dr. Wallace of Colchester,—that he supposed that the statements by Mr Stainton & others that they bred more females than males from caterpillars, might be accounted for by these collectors collecting the largest & finest caterpillars. But this was an error on my part, & Dr. W. maintains that collectors collect equally large & small caterpillars;5 so that I am all astray again, & can in no way conceive why these gentlemen shd have had such different results when collecting free insects & breeding them.
Do you agree with Dr. Wallace that collectors wd collect indifferently large & small caterpillars?—
My dear Sir | Yours sincerely obliged | Ch. Darwin
Footnotes
Summary
CD asks about HD’s observation of sexual call of Coleoptera.
Also comments on statements by collectors that they breed more females than males from caterpillars. CD had thought this might be accounted for by the collection of largest and finest caterpillars, but Alexander Wallace says the collectors take large and small equally. Does HD agree with Wallace?
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-6027
- From
- Charles Robert Darwin
- To
- Henry Doubleday
- Sent from
- London, Chester Place, 4
- Source of text
- American Philosophical Society (Mss.B.D25.)
- Physical description
- ALS 5pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 6027,” accessed on 13 May 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-6027.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 16