15th Dec. 1855
My dear Prof. Riess.
I have just read your letter to Faraday1 carefully over and cannot deny myself this pleasure of saying how much I have been gratified by the perusal of it. It is a plain manly statement, and believe me it is appreciated by Faraday as such. He read a portion of it for me this morning with evident gratification, and this evening he handed the entire letter over to me – It will appear in company with his letter to you in the next number of the Philosophical Magazine.2 Believe me you judge Faraday right when you say that he prefers the utterance of an independent opinion to ‘Gedankenlose Nachahmung’.3 I do not agree with him in Magnetism, and he knows that right well. I do not believe in his lines of force as he believes in them; but he never thinks of swaying me, though a young man, of the weight of his authority. Your concluding remarks4 were peculiarly pleasant to me, for they express the truth in a philosophic spirit. No doubt of it Faraday will work better with his self made tools than if he adopted the tools of another: but I have not the least doubt that every result which he has won by using these tools can be brought into accordance with theories very different from his own. It would be a work of extreme ease to go over all that he has written for some time regarding lines of force, conduction polarity &c. and to shew that every experimental result he has obtained follows in the most simple and evident manner from the fact that the forces with which he deals are polar forces. But as you say he will employ his own weapons best, and the noble use he has made of them ought to prevent us from wishing to see them changed. I had told him before he received your letter of the mistake of translation5 to which you refer. The translation was not made by me, but on the whole it appears to be a very good one.
I have been working at diamagnetic polarity lately. Matteucci, Feilitsch, and others you know denied Weber’s results, and proposed certain conditions for the rigorous demonstration of the principles. I have satisfied all their conditions by proving the polarity of diamagnetic conductors & insulation, solids & liquids. Heavy glass, sulphur, calcareous spar, statuary marble, nitre, phosphorous, wax and other insulators have all been proved to be polar.
In a series of letters to Faraday6 & others Matteucci denied the results described in my last Bakerian Lecture7 – He has made the amende honorable8 by writing to me thus a few days ago.
‘En attendant je voulais vous faire savoir que j’avais trouvé que vos experiences sont bien, et comme j’avais écrit à Faraday et à Grove que j’en doutais je vous prie de lui dire de ma part que je suis parvenu à une complete verification des experiences’!9
Pray present my respects to Mrs. Riess10 and to your family. It is long since I heard from my friend Prof. Magnus. Will you kindly say to him that the first part of his memoir on Hydraulics will appear in the next Phil. Mag.11 Kindest greetings to Professor Rose12 & Poggendorff,13 and to DuBois when you see him. – and now goodbye.
| and believe me always | Yours very sincerely | John Tyndall
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Stabi) Slg Darmstaedter 1855 Tyndall Be. 1-58, 48-9
your letter to Faraday: Faraday had written to Riess on 19 November 1855; Riess translated and answered it on 10 December 1856 as ‘Über die Wirkung nicht-leitender Körper bei der elektrischen Induction’, Poggend. Annal., 97 (1856), pp. 415–41. Tyndall arranged for both letters to be published. See note 2.
Philosophical Magazine: M. Faraday, P. Riess, ‘On the action of non-conducting bodies in electric induction’, Phil. Mag., 11 (1856), pp. 1–17; Faraday (pp. 1–10), Riess (pp. 10–17).
Gedankenlose Nachahmung: thoughtless imitation (German).
Your concluding remarks: After admitting he could not persuade Faraday about the insulation of conductors, Riess wrote: ‘The great philosopher works best with the help of his own conceptions, his self–made tools, whose imperfections he avoids by dextrous applications. But these tools, so efficacious in his hand, are not only useless but very dangerous in the hands of others’ (p. 17).
the mistake of translation: Riess’s earlier article ‘On the action of non-conducting bodies in electric induction’ had been translated from Poggend. Annalen, 92 (1854), pp. 189–92 in Phil. Mag., 9 (1855), pp. 401–13. It evidently did not meet with Riess’s approval.
letters to Faraday & others: not in Faraday Correspondence.
Bakerian Lecture: see letter 1031, n. 2.
amende honorable: a public apology to restore the honour of one who was offended (French).
des experiences: ‘In the meantime I wanted to let you know that I found your experiments to be well made, and since I have written to Faraday and to Grove that I doubted them, I beg you to tell them on my behalf that I came across a full verification of the experiments.’ The quotation is from letter 1161.
Mrs Riess: Riess married Fanny Gütterbock in 1835. Their only daughter Rebecca married the physicist Georg Quincke (1834–1924) in 1863 (ADB).
in the next Phil. Mag.: G. Magnus, ‘Hydraulic researches’, Phil. Mag., 11 (1856), pp. 89–107.
Professor Rose: Heinrich Rose (1795–1864), Professor of Chemistry at the University of Berlin.
Poggendorff: Johann Christian Poggendorff (1796–1877), Professor of Physics at the University of Berlin and editor of the Annalen der Physik since 1824 (DSB).
Please cite as “Tyndall1168,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on