R. Institution, | 11 Nov. 1854.
Many thanks, my dear Tyndall, for your kind letter1 which I have just received. I was anxious about you, thinking you might be confined at home by a little indisposition (as you would call it) and writing, and should probably have called today, in the evening. Now I shall rest, knowing how it is, and I hope you will enjoy the weather and the quietness and the time of work and the time of play, finding them all ministrants to your health and contented happiness.2 Here we jog on, and I have just undertaken the Juvenile Lectures at Christmas,3 thinking them the easiest thing for me to do. Reading Matteucci4 carefully, and also an abstracted translation of Van Rees’ paper,5 is my weighty work; and because of the call it makes on memory, I have now and then to lay them down and cease to the morrow. I think they encourage me to write another paper on lines of force, polarity &c,6 for I was hardly prepared to find such strong support in the papers of Van Rees and Thomson7 for the lines as correct representants of the power and its direction, and many old arguments are renewed in my mind by these papers. But we shall see how the maggot bites presently, and as I fancy I have gained so much by waiting, I may perhaps wait a little longer.
Ever, my dear Tyndall, | Yours truly, | M. Faraday
RI MS JT/TYP/12/4137
Faraday Correspondence, 4:2921
your kind letter: letter missing.
I was anxious…contented happiness: Tyndall had been visiting Hirst at Queenwood for ten days (see letter 0992, n. 1).
Juvenile Lectures at Christmas: Faraday gave the RI’s Christmas Lectures of 1854 on the topic of ‘The Chemistry of Combustion’. See also letter 0747, n. 4.
Matteucci: possibly M. Matteucci, ‘On the Electricity of Flame, with Observations’, Phil. Mag. 8:53 (November 1854), pp. 399–403.
Van Rees’ paper: Richard van Rees (1797–1875), a Dutch mathematician, physicist, and professor at the University of Utrecht. Van Rees’s memoir Over de Theorie der Magnetische Krachtlijnen van Faraday (Amsterdam: C. G. van der Post, 1853), had appeared in German as, ‘Ueber die Faraday’sche Theorie der magnetischen Kraftinien’, Poggend. Annalen. 90:3 (November 1853), pp. 415–36. Faraday cited van Rees in M. Faraday, ‘On some points of magnetic philosophy’, Phil. Mag. 9:57 (February 1855), pp. 81–113.
another paper … polarity &c.: see Faraday, ‘Experimental Researches in Electricity’, Phil Mag. 142 (1852), pp. 25–56.
Thomson: see W. Thomson, ’On the Uniform Motion of Heat in Homogenous Solid Bodies, and its connexion with the Mathematical Theory of Electricity’, Phil. Mag. 7:48 (Supplement 1854), pp. 502–15. Here Thomson directly engaged with Faraday’s work on lines of force.
Please cite as “Tyndall0999,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on