My dear Tom
Bravo! – there can be no mistake about your opinion1 – and mine is just as decided. Before I wrote to you I had made up my mind – indeed before I finished the reading of the letter (which I will send you in a day or two) my resolution was formed. I am glad that your experiments passed off well, glad that you had an opportunity of speaking to Pare who I believe is a well-meaning man & very clever. But I do not remember his expressing a poor opinion to me concerning you2 – He said something about you – something about some addition to your vigour – but never any thing poor regarding you.
I know nothing of your paper to the R.S.3 I know nothing of a paper of my own which was sent into them last November – Both I trust will appear in due season. Du Bois is getting on pretty well – his last lecture4 I should not call quite so successful as his first – But in both cases he has been far more fortunate than in his lecture at the London Institution. I should like to see you here – nevertheless as you say the trip is expensive – and if you now give yourself the habit of keeping down expense it will cause you no trouble by & by when you must do it.
Do you think you could lend me your coil for my Friday evening 1st June?5 – If you could lend it to me and describe one or two pretty experiments it would be of service to me. I might get one from Gassiot – indeed there is one in the house here,6 but Faraday is using it so that I think on the whole if yours could be sent to me it would be most pleasant. Tell Anna I will soon write to her.
Affectionately | John
Monday
RI MS JT/1/T/600
your opinion: on the offer of a post at the University of Toronto; see letter 1080.
a poor opinion to me concerning you: see letter 1080, n. 5.
your paper to the R.S.: see letter 1058, n. 3. Hirst’s paper ‘On the Existence of a Magnetic Medium’ was received by the RS on 14 April 1855 (Roy. Soc. Proc., 7 (1854–5), p. 448).
his last lecture: on 28 April.
coil for my Friday evening 1st June: Tyndall was to deliver the Friday Evening Discourse at the RI on 1 June 1855, entitled ‘On the Currents of the Leyden Battery’. His account of the lecture refers to a ‘wooden cylinder […] round which two [insulated] copper wires, each 75 feet in length, were wound’ (Roy. Inst. Proc., 2 (1854–8), pp. 132–5, on p. 133).
the house here: the RI.
Please cite as “Tyndall1081,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on