Pau. | Nov. 16th 1856
My dear John,
It is quite time I acknowledged the receipt of your two last letters,1 one of which was the testimonial which has already been of service to me and the other was another page or two of the description of your journey which interested both myself, my wife2 and John Martin greatly. When you have leisure another page or two from the journal will be very acceptable. For the last fortnight or more Anna’s average state of health has been much better than it was before that time. The weather has changed, we have had slight frosts at night but bright warm sunny days (generally). Of her worst symptoms, the night perspirations have almost disappeared and the cough and expectoration3 have both decidedly diminished. On the whole therefore I think I may say that Pau4 has been of some service to her already and I live in the hope that it will continue to be so and that at the end of the winter she may be better than she was at the beginning. As yet I have but one pupil5 to whom I give three lessons a week, of an hour each, and for which I get 5 francs a lesson. He is the son of Lord Francis Gordon6 who is an invalid here. The lad is about 16 years old and has received a bad education at the Charter House.7 They intend him to enter the army or some of the public offices, and to fit him for passing the necessary examination in mathematics is my task. From several conversations I have had with Lord and Lady Gordon8 I gather that they by no means approve of the late changes that have been made in the appointments for public offices.9 One day her Ladyship told me that amongst the candidates for some public office of £60 a year she noticed a Wrangler of Cambridge,10 and then in the tone of an injured parent she exclaimed ‘what chance would my boy have against a wrangler I should like to know?’ Indeed, the boy would have but a poor chance amongst far inferior competitors than wranglers. He is not naturally stupid, but he has been allowed to acquire loose, thoughtless habits. His memory and his fingers have been educated but his reason has been sadly neglected. He can convert a circulating decimal into a vulgar fraction with the greatest ease and rapidity, but when I threw 12 franc pieces on the table and asked him to return me five sixths of them he was completely puzzled. He has learnt 3 books of Euclid11 by heart, but I am convinced he never understood a proposition. I confess I was somewhat surprised to find that the son of a Lord has been educated thus, especially since the boy himself is naturally sharp enough. I have told both Lord and Lady Gordon that it will be necessary for me to go over much that he has already done, in short to unteach him a good deal before we can advance to anything new. They seemed to approve of my plain-speaking, as well as of my intentions but I am not sure that by and bye they will think his progress worth the money, for I can easily perceive that in their sight the value of education is chiefly a marketable one. However we shall see. As to myself I am taking advantage of John Martin’s assistance in order to improve my latin. At Berlin12 I was getting on pretty well, but my going to Queenwood13 interrupted me, and for three years I scarcely read a sentence. Now I have taken it up again more thoroughly than before, and have not only recovered what I had forgotten in the three years, but have advanced much further. At present I devote a great deal of time to this as I wish this time to get tolerably well grounded in it, and that before John Martin leaves us again, which he will probably do in January. For translating from Latin into English I choose mathematical books, of course, for it is with mathematical latin that I which to become familiar. I have moreover chosen some works of Jacobi on Determinants and Elliptical functions14 inasmuch as these bear upon the research to which I have long ago decided to devote all my spare time and thought. The most unsatisfactory thing about our residence in France is that I am making little or no progress in speaking French. Except our servant and occasionally a shopman, we have no one with whom to speak French. This is very annoying to me and I have not yet devised any way of improving it. But now I have said enough of myself and of my occupations. I hear you were at Queenwood since you last wrote to me.15 Tell me what you saw there. I noticed with pleasure Sir John Herschel letter to you in the Phil. Mag.16 It is gratifying to me to see that he has appreciated and acknowledged the real and intrinsic merits of your late little research on cleavage,17 viz its philosophic ingenuity, simplicity and elegance. Deal with me better than I deserve and write me soon a long letter. Tell me have you heard from Pridie? Remember me kindly to Francis18 and Bevington19 and receive Anna’s love with mine.
Yours affectionately | T.A. Hirst
P.S. Postage is so cheap that I hope if you meet with anything likely to interest me in newspapers or scientific journals you will send me it. Here it would be a great boon.
RI MS JT/1/H/229
RI MS JT/1/HTYP/480–1
your last two letters: see letters 1283 and 1284, John Tyndall to Thomas Hirst, both dated 9 October 1856, Tyndall Correspondence, vol. 5. The ‘testimonial’ is letter 1284.
my wife: Anna Hirst.
expectoration: the action of coughing up and spitting out mucus or other material from the lungs and respiratory passages (OED).
Pau: in the Pyrenees, southwestern France, which became a popular holiday resort for the British in the second half on the nineteenth century. Thomas and Anna Hirst were visiting Pau for Anna’s health.
one pupil: probably Francis Frederick Gordon (1839–1925), son of Francis Gordon and Isabel Grant. See Debrett’s Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage, and Companionage, 1903 (London: Dean & Son, 1903), p. 448.
Lord Francis Gordon: Francis Arthur Gordon (1808–57), son of the ninth Marquis of Huntly, a notable amateur cricketer and lieutenant colonel in the 1st Life Guards. Gordon died in Paris while Hirst was tutoring his son. See Debrett’s Peerage, p. 448.
Charter House: a boarding school in London founded in 1611 and moved to Surrey in 1872.
Lady Gordon: Isabel Gordon (née Grant, d. 1892), wife of Francis Arthur Gordon (married in 1835), and daughter of General Sir William Keir Grant (1771–1852). See Debrett’s Peerage, p. 448.
late changes… public offices: possibly a reference to the establishment of the Civil Service Commission in 1855 in a bid to end patronage and base appointments on open examinations. The commission was influenced by the publication of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report (1854).
Wrangler of Cambridge: a student who gained first-class honours in their undergraduate degree in mathematics at the University of Cambridge was called a ‘Wrangler’.
Euclid: Euclid of Alexandria (mid-4th-century BCE–mid-3rd-century BCE), a Greek mathematician, especially of geometry. One of the three books Hirst’s pupil would have read was surely Euclid’s Elements, a classic mathematical text.
At Berlin: referring to Hirst’s time studying mathematics in Berlin in 1852–3, after he finished his doctorate at the University of Marburg in July 1852.
my going to Queenwood: referring to Hirst’s appointment to a teaching post at Queenwood College, a boy’s school in Hampshire, England, in mid-1853 (for mathematics for surveying, until 1856). Tyndall kept an interest in Queenwood College, where he had also taught mathematics for surveying, from 1847–8 and again from 1851–3. He spent the time in between his two periods of employment at Queenwood studying in Marburg, Germany. For letters during Tyndall’s time at Queenwood, see M. Baldwin and J. Browne (eds), The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 2: The Correspondence, September 1843–December 1849 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016); R. Barton, J. Rankin, and M. Reidy (eds), The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 3: The Correspondence, January 1850–December 1852 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017); and Tyndall Correspondence, vol. 4.
works of Jacobi on Determinants and Elliptical functions: Carolo Gustavo Jacob Jacobi, Fundamenta Nova Theoriae Functionum Ellipticarum (Regiomonti: Sumptibus Fratrum Borntraeger, 1829).
last wrote to me: see n. 1.
Sir John Herschel letter to you in the Phil. Mag.: J. F. W. Herschel, ‘Remarks on Slaty Cleavage, and the Contortions of Rocks’, Phil. Mag., 12 (1856), pp. 197–8.
late little research on cleavage: see letter 1295, n. 3.
Francis: William Francis.
Bevington: James Buckingham Bevington (1804–92), a wealthy and philanthropic leather merchant, Quaker, and father of one of Tyndall’s Queenwood pupils. Tyndall and Bevington were good friends in the 1850s and remained in contact throughout their lives. See Tyndall Correspondence, vol. 4, and ‘Obituary’, Saddlery and Harness, 2 (1892), p. 58.
Please cite as “Tyndall1298,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on