Ɛpsilon

From T. H. Farrer   5 November 1881

66 Hills Road | Cambridge

5 Nov/81

My dear Mr Darwin

Effie brought me yesterday from Bryanston Square your book on worms,1 which I should have got & read long since, if I had not been very busily employed in unearthing and squashing the far more unworthy reptiles who are preaching Fair Trade.2 Indeed it is a shame to put them in comparison with your honest clients whose dealings & transfers like all honest trading is good for themselves and does a lot of good to others at the same time, good which they do not think of.3

Abinger I see plays a much larger part than I had imagined.—4 that pleasant autumn fortnight has given a good big stone to the building.— You, like Leibnitz, will have to take as a motto the value of the apparently “Infinitely little”.5 It is strange to think of worms playing so large a part.

We are having a very pleasant night & morning with the H’s on our way to my chief at Birmingham.6 She seems very well—though as to looks—!! It is impossible not to be anxious but everything seems as promising as possible.—7 H, has been showing me the shop about which he seems in excellent spirits.8 Think of its being suggested to him to devise a frame for pianos

Believe me | Sincerely yours | T H Farrer

1
Farrer and his wife, Katherine Euphemia (Effie) Farrer, had a residence at 11 Bryanston Square, London. Farrer’s name appears on CD’s presentation list for Earthworms (see Appendix IV).
2
Proponents of fair trade advocated selective use of tariffs; on debates over fair trade and free trade in 1881, see Biagini 1992, pp. 132–4. Farrer later wrote a detailed study of the issue and advocated free trade (see Farrer 1882).
3
CD discussed the valuable role of worms in turning and enriching the soil (see Earthworms, pp. 312–13, 316).
4
Farrer had provided CD with observations of worm activity at the remains of a Roman villa at Abinger, Surrey (see Earthworms, pp. 180–94; see also Correspondence, vol. 25, letter from T. H. Farrer, 23 September 1877, and Correspondence vol. 28, letter from T. H. Farrer, 9 October 1880).
5
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had used the term infinitesimal to refer to imaginary infinitely small quantities in his development of the calculus (see Katz and Sherry 2012).
6
The Farrers visited Horace and Ida Darwin in Cambridge. Farrer was permanent secretary of the Board of Trade; the president was the Birmingham industrialist and MP, Joseph Chamberlain.
7
Ida Darwin was pregnant.
8
The ‘shop’ was the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company (see Cattermole and Wolfe 1987, pp. 12–22).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13461,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13461