Marburg 17 Oct. 1850
My Dear Sir.
Here with you will receive the translation,1 I hope it will please you. I have not in every instance stuck verbatim to the text but the deviations are inconsiderable – nothing however has been written which I did not see the meaning of and hence it is probable that what has written is understandable.
In page 1 an allusion to water is omitted, it adds nothing to the sense.2
In the 1st line of page 3 the letters ‘[M]3H’ occur. H4 is omitted in the diagram. It would have been better to use merely the letter [M]5 in the text.
In the same page I is used, but it is J in the diagram; this of course is unimportant. There is a hastily written sentence in page 4 (4-5 printed memoir) It will I think be better to omit it altogether. I have crossed it out in the manuscript but have not totally defaced it.
A few expletives in page 21 (25 mem.) are also struck out – their insertion would do more harm than good.
I have left the term Wassertrommel gabläse6 to yourself to translate. There is probably a technical name for it in England.
The note in page 27 (33 memoir) is obscure.7 The funnels cannot both be above the surface. It is quite right if we suppose the interior funnel to reach above the water for then if it were raised the fluid would flow downwards between them and carry air along with it. But if both are above the surface how is the water to get between them? I have translated it however nearly as it stands.
I have looked over the last numbers of Poggendorff. There is an exceedingly interesting paper in No. 7 ‘Ueber die Unhaltbarkeit der bisherige Theorie der Newton schen Farbenringe von E Wilde’.8
I learn from private sources that a memoir from Plücker on the old subject is at present in Poggendorff’s hands and will soon appear.9 Should you wish for a translation of either or both of these <one word illeg> stehe zu Dienst.10
With best wishes | believe me Dear Sir | most truly yours | John Tyndall
I expect to have something of my own11 to send you soon.
Might I beg of you to have the enclosed12 dropped into the nearest post Office? | J.T.
– I believe the editor’s box is in Crane Court. this will be nearer than the post office.
StBPL T&F, Authors’ letters
the translation: Tyndall translated G. Magnus, ‘Über die Bewegung der Flüssigkeiten’, Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Aus them Jahre 1848 (Transactions of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin. From 1848) (1850), pp. 135–64. The translation was published as G. Magnus, ‘On the Motion of Fluids’, Phil. Mag., 1:1 (January 1851), pp. 1–23.
adds nothing to the sense: at the beginning of this paragraph, and of the following two paragraphs, someone (Francis presumably) has added ‘good’.
[M]: it appears as the letter ‘M’ in the translation.
H: Tyndall has written this with parallel lines above and below the letter, though it appears simply as ‘H’ in the published translation.
[M]: Tyndall has written this with parallel lines above and below.
Wassertrommel gabläse: it was translated as ‘water bellows’. See for example the title of the appendix on p. 163 of the original paper and p. 20 of the translation.
The note … is obscure: this is on p. 21 of the translation.
‘Ueber … von E Wilde’: E. Wilde, ‘Ueber die Unhaltbarkeit der bisherige Theorie der Newton’schen Farbenringe’, Poggend. Annal., 80:7 (1850), pp. 407–21. For the translation see letter 0452.
I learn … soon appear: as letter 0446 makes clear, Knoblauch was receiving word of Plücker’s intentions from his cousin in Bonn. We assume that this was further information from the same source. The memoir appeared in the September issue of Poggendorff: J. Plücker and A. Beer, ‘Ueber die magnetischen Axen der Krystalle und ihre Beziehung zur Krystallform und zu den optischen Axen’, Poggend. Annal., 81:9 (1850), pp. 115–62. See letters 0452 and 0457 on Tyndall’s translations of this paper.
stehe zu Dienst: I am at your service (German). The illegible word is presumably ‘Ich’, though it does not look like it.
something of my own: Tyndall was probably alluding to his intended investigations on water-jets which Magnus’s paper (n. 1) prompted (see letter 0456).
the enclosed: not identified, but the first of many letters which Tyndall asked Francis to post.
Please cite as “Tyndall0448,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on 30 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/tyndall/letters/Tyndall0448