Queenwood College | Augst 31st 1854
My dear John.
Go to Richmond on Sunday next and let us postpone our meeting1 for a week or two when I know you will require another journey. My reason for so doing is a good one Atkinson has been and stopped until Wednesday,2 his visit was very pleasant to me but it has interfered with my work and made me a little behind with it. Tomorrow I shall have a clear days work before me and on Sunday I must write two or three important letters. Next Sunday week or fortnight as you like I will arrange to meet you wherever you please.3
The Phil. Mag. this month is very meagre.4 It does not contain your report of Wertheims memoir5 as I expected it would.
On Monday I sent the Electro-magnet6 which I hope you received The other day I tried to recall your reasonings on the Diamagnetic and Magnetic problems7 and I could not do so to my satisfaction I wish you would write me a short account of them8 and I will give them my best consideration for you.
In my leisure time I am reading a little book just now which you once recommended to me a tract on Education by the Dean of Hereford.9 There are many satisfactory hints and suggestions in it plainly shewing that the man has broad and liberal notions of education
Queenwood is in excellent condition at present. McDougall is gaining experience and I have some hopes that he will profit by it. He is a grim earnest fellow and not without common sense though his normal school training has unfitted him greatly for a position such as Queenwood. He appears to have been accustomed to coercing rough ill cultivated pupils, and he is only just beginning to see that his present pupils are really generous and gentlemanly little fellows. It is just possible that one or two collisions which have already occurred may teach him something. The fellow has really some character about him and on that fact all my hopes rest; he is dogged and blunt enough but you can push against him. His companion Blanche the last comer is far inferior he is an empty headed canting fellow, last Mutual improvement night he volunteered a lecture10 on the fixed stars and gave them a twaddling Methodist parson’s sermon which made every teacher present uneasy in his seat. Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately I was not there. If it had been a good lecture it would have been a great service and a good introduction for him, as it was it was a miserable failure and it will be his last lecture at Queenwood. Let me hear soon from you and believe me
Yours affectionately | T. A. Hirst
RI MS JT/1/H/204
RI MS JT/1/HTYP/358
Go to Richmond … postpone our meeting: see letter 0966, wherein Tyndall invited Hirst to meet him near Winchester. Hirst declined, and Tyndall instead travelled alone to Windsor and Richmond (see letter 0966, n. 1). See also letter 0786, n. 10.
Atkinson … Wednesday: Tyndall noted Atkinson’s arrival in his journal entry of 26 August 1854 (Journal, JT/2/13b/685).
meet you wherever you please: Tyndall later suggested they meet in Winchester on 17 September (see letters 0970, n. 12 and 0971).
Phil. Mag … meagre: see Phil. Mag. 8:51 (September 1854), pp. 161–240.
Wertheims memoir: Hirst had been translating M. G. Wertheim, ‘Mémoire Sur la double réfraction temporairement produite dans les corps isotropes, et sur la relation entre l’élasticité mécanique et entre l’élasticité optique’, Annal. Chim. et Phys. 40 (1854), pp. 156–221. The English translation would appear in two parts: M. G. Wertheim, ‘On the double Refraction temporarily produced in Isotropic Bodies’, Phil. Mag. 8:52 (October 1854), pp. 241–61; and Phil. Mag. 8:53 (November 1854), pp. 342–57.
I sent the Electro-magnet: Tyndall requested the magnet in letter 0964, n. 4 and Hirst said that he was packing it up in letter 0965, n. 4.
your reasonings on diamagnetic and magnetic problems: see letters 0710, n. 7 and 0821, n. 4.
write me a short account of them: see letter 0970.
tract on Education by the Dean of Hereford: Richard Dawes (1793–1867), an educator and the Dean of Hereford from 1850 until his death in 1867. The ‘tract on Education’ to which Hirst referred was Dawes’s Suggesting Hints towards Improved Secular Instruction, Making it Bear upon Practical Life (London: R. Groombridge & Sons, 1849).
Blanche … volunteered a lecture: the lecture is mentioned in a report of the ‘Mutual Improvement Society’, The Queenwood Observer 2:5 (31 August 1854), pp. 33–40, on p. 35.
Please cite as “Tyndall0968,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on