Ɛpsilon

To J. H. Gilbert   25 February 1881

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | (Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.) [4 Bryanston Street, London.]

Feb. 25th 1881

Dear Dr Gilbert

I am very much obliged to you for your note, which will make me much more cautious than I shd. otherwise perhaps have been.—1 I do not think that the acidity of the contents of the alimentary canal of worms can be due to uric acid, for they begin to be acid so high up, even slightly so in the gizzard, & the acidity is not due to the digestive fluid, which is of the nature of the pancreatic secretion.— It was partly out of mere natural curiosity which made me desirous to know whether common vegetable mould was acid, & whether my testing was correct.2 I shd. like to see Detmer’s paper & How Crops Grow, if you are sure you can spare them for a week or fortnight, for I read German very slowly.—3

Please address parcel to me “Orpington Stn. S.E.Ry.”.—

I am writing this away from home, but shall return next Thursday.—4

Many thanks for the little article about Bread;— I suspected how the case stood. Many years ago Prof. Henslow tried labourers with white & brown bread & came to your conclusion.—5

Thanks, also, for your Address, which I read with the greatest interest as it appeared in Nature.—6

Pray believe me | Yours very faithfully | Ch. Darwin.

2
For CD’s method of testing the acidity of vegetable mould, see the letter to J. H. Gilbert, 5 February 1881.
3
Detmer 1871 and S. W. Johnson [1870]. See letter from J. H. Gilbert, 22 February 1881 and nn. 4 and 6.
4
CD stayed with his daughter Henrietta Emma Litchfield at her home in London from 24 February to 3 March 1881 (CD’s ‘Journal’ (Appendix II)).
5
The Reform Bread League was founded in October 1880 with the aim of encouraging the British to consume brown bread. White bread was seen as less nutritious and a principal cause of malnutrition among the working classes, for whom it was a staple. (See J. Burnett 2005.) In his letter on bread reform published in the Journal of the Society of Arts, 21 January 1881, pp. 144–5, Gilbert pointed out that this was an ‘utter fallacy’, and suggested that the working classes might prefer white bread because brown bread passed through them too quickly for their systems to extract its full nutritive value. As rector of Hitcham from 1837 to 1861, John Stevens Henslow carried out many reforms in order improve the conditions of the labouring poor in his parish (Russell-Gebbett 1977).
6
This probably refers to Gilbert’s address to the chemical section of the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Swansea in 1880; CD’s copy of J. H. Gilbert 1880 is in the Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL. The version CD read had appeared in Nature, 16 September 1880, pp. 472–6; 23 September 1880, pp. 479–9; and 30 September 1880, pp. 523–7.

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

0.1 (Railway … S.E.R.)] parentheses added
1.3 of worms] interl
1.4 slightly so] ‘so’ interl
1.4 the acidity] above del ‘this’
1.6 out] above del ‘out’
1.6 mere] interl
2.1 to me] interl after del ‘ment’

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13066,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13066