Ɛpsilon

To P. R. Head   27 October 1881

Down, Beckenham, Kent.

Oct. 27, 1881

Dear Sir

I thank you cordially for your great kindness in sending me the errata, which are just in time for the third thousand.1 How I could possibly have overlooked the gross and staring error on the mean of 4 angles, I cannot comprehend. The 1.9 for .19 inch had been already corrected.2 With respect to “chevaux”, my wife and my good French Dictionary say it is right.3

In Haste | Yours faithfully and much obliged | Charles Darwin.

Copy

1
The addressee has not been further identified. No letter from Head containing errata for Earthworms has been found. CD’s publisher had asked for any errata for the third printing (see letter from R. F. Cooke, 25 October 1881 and n. 1.
2
The correction of 1.9 to .19 in Earthworms, p. 134, had been pointed out by Henry Nottidge Moseley in his letter to CD of 9 October 1881, and by John Wesley Judd in his letter of 10 October 1881.
3
See Earthworms, p. 71; CD had written ‘chevaux de frise’, French for ‘Frisian horses’, a term used to refer to medieval spiked anti-cavalry obstacles.

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13436,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13436