Dear Dr Tyndall,
I am very glad you have chosen a subject1 which will be so popular, but do not limit yourself in your treatment of it. Do you happen to know Schleiden’s Plant.2 It is worth your looking at in connection with your subject.
The politics of science have not advanced this week.
I have today received a long & violent answer by Matteucci to Mullers3 abstract of Du Bois4 work but he very unfairly writes it to me.
Speaking of Du Bois he says le génie irritable de ce savant5 & elsewhere he calls him jeune Physiologiste6 & he makes Muller out almost a liar because Muller said there was not only a want of clearness but sometimes of fairness in Matteucci’s writings. I must send it to Du Bois if Matteucci has not sent him a copy for his instruction.
Believe me | Yours most truly | H. Bence Jones
Feb 28. 1853
RI MS JT/1/J/42
RI MS JT/1/TYP/672
chosen a subject: Tyndall proposed the subject ‘On Air and Water’ for his upcoming course of four lectures at the RI (see letters 0720 and 0726, n. 4).
Schleiden’s Plant: Matthias Jakob Schleiden (1804–81), Die Pflanze und ihr Leben (1848), trans. Arthur Henfrey, The Plant: A Biography in a series of lectures (London: H. Bailliere, 1848).
Mullers: Johannes Peter Müller (1801–58), German comparative anatomist and physiologist under whom Emil du Bois-Reymond worked and studied (Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond, pp. 39–54). Du Bois-Reymond was undertaking research on animal electricity, and was critical of Matteucci’s previous work on the subject.
Du Bois: Emil du Bois-Reymond
le génie irritable de ce savant: French, ‘the terrible genius of this learned man’.
jeune Physiologiste: French, ‘young physiologist’.
Please cite as “Tyndall0724,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on