Royal Institution | 8th. Feb. 1854.
My dear Tom
I have just arranged my notes for the lecture at the London Institution tomorrow1 and as I have an hour's breathing time I will expend a portion of it in your service. Were it your object to make me knit my brow and feel stern at heart your letter2 was effectual. In fact the interest I took in your account of how the fraud3 is prospering excited my interest so much as almost to inflict upon me the very thing which your letter was kindly intended to dissipate, namely – a good headache. I pictured that faltering little man4 when his duty was pointed out to him crouching as you say and whimpering that things must take their course. Certainly had things taken their course with him, had he not been already two or three times rescued from the destruction to the verge of which his own folly had brought him he would not now enjoy the privilege of getting wrong again. Of course the string is a mouldered one and it is waste of time to harp upon it the man has neither insight nor principle and would be a scoundrel if tempted and not checked by motives external to himself. I wrote to him5 about Mummery and imagine that I have stirred his choler or his fear a little. I fully agree with you that the semblance of such fraud must not be tolerated at Queenwood and it is pure shortsightedness on the part of your colleagues which prevents them from seeing the thing in the same light as you do. The stolid stultified little materialist, it has never occurred to him what an effect a straightforward decisive honorable mode of action at such a juncture must have on the whole dynamics of his establishment. He poor blind worm only looks at the fact of losing a teacher and is unable to see the forces which his own vacillation tends to damp and to destroy. I have taken him in my claws and fluttered him as an eagle would a wren. It is only by such a process that you can make his duty clear to him. When he sees that you are in earnest he begins to fancy that you must be right. Goodbye
Yours affectionately | John
RI MS JT/1/HTYP/311
LT Typescript Only
the lecture at the London Institution tomorrow: presented on 9 February, this was the second of six lectures Tyndall gave at the LI in 1854 on Electricity and Magnetism (see letter 0865, n. 6).
your letter: letter 0879.
the fraud: reference to John Mummery’s purchase of a German doctoral diploma (see letter 0879, n. 5).
that faltering little man: George Edmondson.
I wrote to him: letter missing.
Please cite as “Tyndall0881,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on