I was in the library with many more before the lecture.2 Five minutes before the commencement, I was talking to somebody, when I heard Faraday’s voice saying, I am looking for Tyndall,’ ‘Here I am!’ I replied. ‘I am going in,’ he said, ‘will you come with me?’ He took me by the hand and we walked together towards the theatre. He went in and I followed. The house was full. He stopped short in the midst of the space before the lecture table, and commenced talking to me about the apparatus upon it.3 ‘Do you know Herschel? he asked. On learning that I had not been introduced to him, he singled him out on one of the benches, and introduced me to him. This occurred before the eyes of the assembled congregation, dukes included. I saw in a moment what his object was: it was, in his own quiet way, a public recognition of your palefaced brother – a kind of baptism of a scientific infant. Small as the incident was, I don’t know that England could do anything more gratifying to me.
RI MS JT/5/10/664
LT Typescript Only
[4 February 1854]: this is a fragment of the original letter that was transcribed and included in LT’s biographical notes on Tyndall. The full, handwritten copy is missing. LT noted that it was written on ‘Feb. 4./54’, and the content follows entirely from Tyndall’s journal entry of 3 February, which was written at the end of the day ‘past 12 o’clock’ (JT/2/13b/656).
the lecture: William Robert Grove’s Friday evening lecture at the RI entitled, ‘On the Transmission of Electricity by Flame and Gases’ took place on 3 February 1854 (Roy. Inst. Proc., vol. 1, pp. 359–62).
about the apparatus upon it: the RI’s large galvanometer discussed in Grove ‘On the Transmission of Electricity by Flame and Gases’, Roy. Inst. Proc., vol. 1, p. 362. Tyndall also explicitly referred to the galvanometer in his journal entry for 3 February (JT/2/13b/656).
Please cite as “Tyndall0878,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on