Faraday to John Tyndall   11 November 1854

R. Institution, | 11 Nov. 1854.

Many thanks, my dear Tyndall, for your kind letter which I have just received. I was anxious about you, thinking you might be confined at home by a little indisposition (as you would call it) and writing, and should probably have called today, in the evening. Now I shall rest, knowing how it is, and I hope you will enjoy the weather and the quietness and the time of work and the time of play, finding them all ministrants to your health and contented happiness. Here we jog on, and I have just undertaken the Juvenile Lectures at Christmas, thinking them the easiest thing for me to do¹. Reading Matteucci² carefully, and also an abstracted translation of Van Rees’ paper³, is my weighty work; and because of the call it makes on memory, I have now and then to lay them down and cease to the morrow. I think they encourage me to write another paper on lines of force, polarity &c⁴, for I was hardly prepared to find such strong support in the papers of Van Rees and Thomson⁵ for the lines as correct representants of the power and its direction, and many old arguments are renewed in my mind by these papers. But we shall see how the maggot bites presently, and as I fancy I have gained so much by waiting, I may perhaps wait a little longer.

Ever, my dear Tyndall, | Yours truly, | M. Faraday