While life will remain in this bosom of mine,
Every thought of my soul shall to Tyndall incline.
Ballinabrauna | Thursday1 Morning
‘My dear Tyndall’
Three times hurrah for mottoizing!!! (There is a coining secundus2 for you)
I received your epistle of last Sunday3 on yesterday evening, and not withstanding your determination to keep up the fire of correspondence with unceasing ardour, yet I find that you must, at intervals, deviate from such a resolution. This circumstance is very dejecting to me, though I must confess that I am frequently constrained to desist from responding to many of your letters through intervention of unforeseen events; however one of the poets says:
‘Act well your part, there all the honour lies.’4
Your will is my deed at any time, and as to my giving nonentity an existence and abstracting the little gentleman from the vortex in which he seems to be enveloped, it was only a puerile effort on my part to presume such a thing; and though poets may hurl their innuendos at such seeming impossibilities, yet Emerson, Simpson,5 and Newton, despite the phrenzied ravings and mad ambitions of some silly rhymers,6 established mathematically, a positive value for zero, and even gave quantities below zero an existence from the investigation of transcendental curves;7 but as I did
‘Cast of manure a wagon full around
To raise a single daisy from the ground
Create a whirlwind from the earth to draw
A goose’s feather and exalt a straw.’8
I flatter myself that I have satisfied you that nonentity is equivalent to any given quantity, in a geometrical point of view.9
Believe me dear Tyndall, that we have been favoured with severe weather in Carlow,10 so inclement indeed, that Frenchhorn11 was taken by the peak in such a way that a Siberian, inured as he is to the penetrating blasts of the Arctic Ocean, could not pretend to cross Old Bawnree.12 I kept very close to the fire for four days but I have resumed my usual occupations, as winter’s grey mantle has been very gently removed. I am sure the County Cork presented a terrific appearance, as the poet has been so confoundedly mistaken. He would not have been in error had he said (so far as I am concerned),
‘’Tis there the bonny laddy lives
The laddy I loved best.’13
Fear not your geometrical apostles,14 they are faithful servants; they will duly perform their mission: they will make the loquacious become dumb, and cause the dumb to speak. I wish you may have benefited from the effusions of their great prototypes Peter and Paul.15
Your ever faithful teacher | John Conwill
P.S. The reason I expatiated so much on your poetical phrase of four lines, is, Emerson, Simpson and Newton were attacked by some poetical dolts;16 I thank you for the eulogium which you have conferred on me through the medium of that poetical quotation.
RI MS JT/1/11/3515
LT Transcript Only
Thursday: LT gives postmark as 11 February 1841.
secundus: second (Latin).
your epistle of last Sunday: missing letter, which would have contained one or more of Tyndall’s mottos.
Act well your part, there all the honour lies: A. Pope, Essay on Man, IV.193.
Emerson, Simpson: The eminent mathematicians William Emerson (1701–82) and Robert Simson (1687–1768).
phrenzied ravings … silly rhymers: A number of poems were written celebating Isaac Newton and his scientific innovations, including Edmund Halley’s poem that prefaced Newton’s Principia (1687) and James Thomson’s A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton (1727). Romantics, however, often attacked Newton’s view of the universe; for example, in several of his poems William Blake portrayed the Newtonian universe as sterile. John Keats, Charles Lamb and other poets attended a dinner in 1817 and drank to ‘Newton's health, and confusion to mathematics’. An account of that incident was only published in 1853 in T. Taylor, Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, History Painter, 3 vols (London: Longman, 1853), vol. 1, p. 385.
a positive value … transcendental curves: Euclid, following Aristotle, made the distinction between number and magnitude; and in his Elements he expressed magnitudes as ratios, not numbers. By contrast, numbers had to be positive integers, and therefore numbers did not include zero and ‘quantities below zero’. With the development of calculus and analytic geometry the separation between number and magnitude was undermined. Thus for Newton (and later writers such as Simson and Emerson) zero and negatives were accepted as numbers.
Cast of manure … exalt a straw: From John Wolcot (Peter Pindar), ‘Unpublished Line on Dr Johnson’, Mirror of Literature, 14 (1829), p. 248.
that nonentity … point of view: For Conwill, who was steeped in geometry, non-entity lacks any specific quantity or magnitude; therefore any quantity can be attributed to it.
severe weather in Carlow: Freeman’s Journal, 9 February 1841, p. [3].
Frenchhorn: Frenchhorn Hill; presumably one of the peaks to the west of Ballinabranah.
Old Bawnree: Bawnree is within the parish of Old Leighlin.
‘’Tis there the bonny laddy lives | The laddy I loved best’: Conwill composes his own lines in the style of the eighteenth-century Jacobite ballad ‘Highland Lad’, which laments the departure of a ‘Bonnie laddie’ to take part in a Jacobite rising (Jacobite Meolodies (Glasgow: Richard Griffin, 1825), pp. 194–6).
Fear not your geometrical apostles: Conwill had sent Tyndall twelve testing mathematical problems that he believed would distinguish between deep and shallow mathematicians.
great prototypes Peter and Paul: Peter was one of the 12 disciples (apostles) chosen by Jesus to promulgate his message. Although Paul (Saul of Tarsus, c. 5 – c. 67) was not among the original 12 apostles, he is often referred to as ‘Paul the Apostle’ on account of his teaching of Christ’s gospel, recorded in ‘The Acts of the Apostles’ and ‘The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews’.
some poetical dolts: see n. 6.
Please cite as “Tyndall0039,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on 28 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/tyndall/letters/Tyndall0039