Faraday to Julius Plücker   23 March 1857

Royal Institution | London | 23 March 1857

My dear Sir

Let me acknowledge, first your letter of the 2nd January¹, and now the letter² & paper³ which I received only a few days ago. The paper I have read & sent on to Professor Miller of Cambridge who is now the Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society⁴: & I have sent with it the letter to Admiral Smyth who has left the Secretaryship since his elevation in rank. Your paper appears to me to be a very carefully elaborated work, but I am quite unable to enter into the mathematical part of it. The Formate of copper appears to have been of great service in your investigation⁵[.]

With regard to the note at p6⁶. I hardly know what to say. I understood that you & Tyndall met each other at Vienna⁷ & I was in hopes that you would have come to a thorough understanding with each other. I do not mean that you would have agreed in conclusion because every scientific man has a right to his own - but that both sides would have found reason to believe that the other did not charge him with wilful misstatement. Dr. Tyndall thinks that you have implied such a charge and says that whether you meant it or not your words conveyed the meaning in which he understood them to many others in the same sense as to himself. I suppose that as long as you say they did not convey that meaning & could not convey it he will think he can only clear himself from the charge of wilfully misrepresenting you by proving that they did convey it and so the disturbed feeling is kept up.

In the present case I should have thought that such explanations as we frequently have in our House of Commons would have been satisfactory. There when one party says they did not mean to convey a certain impression the other party is immediately satisfied that there was no intention to convey that impression. But such things as these are far more easily settled by word of mouth than by letter & that was the reason why I hoped much from your meeting at Vienna. I am very sorry for this affair I do not remember the expressions referred to and would