April 9th 1842.
‘My dear Tyndall’
I believe you will coincide with me in saying that good letter writing is a sure indication of an expanded mind, and therefore I am justified in my remarks on your graphic mode of narration;1 for as a man of no small notoriety2 said:–
‘Of all the arts in which the learned excel
‘The first in rank is that of writing well.’3
As to ‘Hume and his colleagues’,4 I leave every individual that pleases to indulge in his own ideas about their having extended their notions of revealed religion5 too far; but this much I can say, though I am no advocate of theirs, that I often found their arguments too stubborn for pulpit orators and Altar declaimers. However, humble as I am, I think I could upset many of their far-fetched objections to Revealed Religion. I am sure they would appear nought in your view. I now fondly anticipate that ere long, you will become a star of the first magnitude in the Mathematical world, as you are now traversing through the regions of geometry, Algebra, and Mechanics, to the difficulties in Tyson6 – <words missing>
Give my best regards to Evans as I understand he has been removed to Cork.7
Yours truly | J. Conwill.
RI MS JT 1/11/3525
LT Transcript Only
my remarks on your graphic mode of narration: see letter 0135.
a man of no small notoriety: John Sheffield, 1st Duke of Buckingham and Normanby (1648–1721).
‘Of all the arts …writing well’: paraphrase of the opening lines of Sheffield’s Essay on Poetry (1682), ‘Of Things in which Mankind does most excell, | Nature’s chief Master-piece is writing well’, 1–2.
Hume and his colleagues: see letter 0135, n. 2.
their notions of revealed religion: In Christianity, revealed religion is founded principally on the revelations of God to mankind in the Bible. The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume contended, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), that as miracles were a violation of the laws of nature, there was not sufficient basis in the testimony of the Bible to believe they had occurred.
Tyson: Edwin Colman Tyson (b. c. 1796), Fellow of Catherine Hall, Cambridge, and Master of the Royal Mathematical School at Christ’s Hospital. Tyson’s principal mathematical publication was Key to Bonnycastle’s Guide to Arithmetic (London: J. F. Dove, 1829); he also edited, revised and enlarged several of John Bonnycastle’s textbooks on algebra and geometry. On Bonnycastle, see letter 0123, n. 4.
I understand he has been removed to Cork: Phillip Evans had been sent from Bandon to Cork ahead of his journey to Liverpool to join the English Ordnance Survey; see letter 0137.
Please cite as “Tyndall0139,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on