To Thomas Archer Hirst   29th July

Queenwood 29th July

My Dear Tom

Your letter¹ pleased me exceedingly, your estimate of Liebig was cool, quiet, unexaggerated and just. I smell this, there is an internal odour² about the words which render external proof unnecessary – That was a pretty episode with the little girl. In short I believe you have measured him as accurately as most men will do.

In the last two numbers of the Athenaeum³ there appears an advertisement regarding the University of Toronto. I believe you have a number which contains it, 6 professorships are vacant and amongst the number one for physics, for this I intend to become a candidate and have already written to Magnus and Poggendorff⁴ for testimonials – A note accompanies this to Knoblauch⁵ for the same object. It is not altogether certain that I shall propose for it, as I intend writing a long letter to Faraday⁶ to day, laying my position here before him and requesting his advice. If there were sufficient grounds to hope that within a reasonable time some thing worth while would turn up in England I would remain. This he will probably know; at all events I will be guided by his advice. If I apply I should say it will take nearly a year from the present time ere the matter is decided, so that my removal from Queenwood – in case I should be successful – would not be too abrupt. Indeed I feel a strong reluctance to move from Queenwood so speedily. I would gladly remain a year or two if I thought my chances good at the end of that time; but it would be imprudent to permit an opportunity like the present to pass un-noticed.

Mr Edmonson as I often told you is a reed shaken with the wind. He is a man between 50 and 60 and an educator for nearly 40 years, but has never yet pierced beyond the skin of human nature. That undemonstrated force, alluded to by Emerson in his essay <on> character,⁷ he lacks totally. He is a well cultivated cabbage plant, as Tom Carlyle would say, but he wants the elements which might enable him to turn to himself as an interpreter of what goes on in the heart of a sapling which nature intended for an oak.⁸ He must, in short, be converted into a mere organ here. He is a kind of governmental fiction – like the queen of England – useful, perhaps, as a point of reference in certain cases, and that is all. His wife is a noble kind of woman.

Debus I like daily more and more, he is a strong-hearted upright fellow. Haas is good gold to the very heart but he lacks the iron and steel of Debus, the piercing power of observation – in a word the natural force.

My estimation of Stegmann never lessened. You see the man from the first and therefore cannot be disappointed with him. Stegmann belongs to the number who posses a power of character which is surprisingly rare. I am inclined to think that Liebig has a strong dash of this too, and his coolness and his almost scorn have this more perhaps as a basis than his scientific fame.

I wonder would Gerling give me a testimonial.⁹ He has already given me one but a weak and good-for-nothing thing; indeed when he gave it he and I were not very warm. If he has read any papers of mine he would perhaps feel himself justified from this to speak a little more strongly. If you are on good terms with him I wish you would ask him. The more the better.

It is now approaching breakfast time. Martin Kidd¹⁰ I expect has his letter¹¹ by this time. I will say no more. One word – I declare the intelligence about the bowels elevated me so that I was prompted to write a song of thanksgiving on the subject.

Yours | Tyndall

RI MS JT/1/HTYP/152

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