To Thomas Archer Hirst   21st. March 1854

21st. March 1854.

My dear Tom

To day I finished my 10th lecture,¹ one of the easiest and the most pleasant that I have given during the season. I was pale and hazy in the brain however and Mrs Faraday seeing this had me up to tea with them where I spent a couple of hours pleasantly enough. One good sign I see in my lectures, the audience instead of diminishing is steadily increasing and to day I had a very fair house full. I am now at home sipping a glass of Scotch ale and writing to you by way of cheating my thoughts into quietness. You certainly give me no encouragement to poetize, which I humbly suggest betrays a certain absence of poetic appreciation on your part – for I hold the little scrap I sent you² was well worth reading although you think proper to say it was not worth much in itself. You ask me what I am going to do with myself at Easter. I have uphill work before me I can assure you, for the next two months. I have a Friday evening to give,³ one of those educational lectures,⁴ and my course of seven besides.⁵ Nevertheless I should not mind taking two or three days holiday at Easter. When do you break up? I think I should like to see you all together before this consummation takes place. I should not mind making a foot journey with you somewhere. But much time I cannot spare as I have not yet made a single experiment for my Friday evening nor do I yet know the experiments which the course I intend to give will admit of. Both of these things I must contrive to attend to during the holidays.

I wish you would contrive to carry the following request from me to DuBois.⁶ To read that article to which he refers⁷ from beginning to end and point out to me where I have cast a single doubt upon his experimental results. It has been said to me in London by people who have read that article – ‘well Tyndall you endorse all DuBois facts’ – and DuBois himself on the contrary states that he did not expect me to speak so sceptically of his experimental results. I never doubted his experimental results. He must not have read the article when he wrote to you upon the subject. Since I received your note⁸ I have read it over myself and I cannot for the life of me see where I have expressed myself sceptically. No man could gather from that article what my private convictions on the subject are, and I would take leave to say that DuBois himself does not at the present moment know what these convictions are. My opinion as to his experiments I unhesitatingly avow – that they are strictly correct and executed in a masterly manner. But my opinion as to his theoretic views I have carefully abstained from expressing publicly. Of course I claim the right of a free man to form an opinion upon these and all other matters which are within the scope of my intellect, but I dare affirm that what I have published on the subject does not furnish any reason to conclude that I entertain a trace of that scepticism to which DuBois alludes. If you could manage to say so much to him it would perhaps tend to set matters right between us. By what I have written I am prepared to abide until further enlightened; the article was composed with the fullest appreciation of DuBois merits and the most sincere desire to render those merits the fullest justice.

And now having finished my ale – finished all I had to say to you and nearly finished my paper, all three conclusions coincide harmoniously in the intimation that it is time for me to wish you good night and to call myself

Your affectionate | John.

RI MS JT/1/HTYP/328

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