Royal Institution. | Friday night
My dear Huxley,
I want very much to see Agassiz’s ‘Etudes sur les Glaciers’2 do you know where I can get a look at it? We have not got it.
Do you know whether Agassiz wrote anything upon the Aar3 after 1843? A map4 was constructed for him by an engineer named Wild,5 but whether it was ever published I know not; do you know anything about it?
Could you lend me those sketches of the crevasses that you took underneath the ‘Pavillion’6 I should like to set one of my lady hearers to copy them upon a grand scale.
I am working very hard. And this rascally brain of mine often murmurs and simmers and boils, and almost swears it will work no longer.
Kind regards—I had almost impudently said ‘love’ to Mrs Huxley.7 But even if I did it would be a mere Irishism8 and valued accordingly.
Ever Yours | John Tyndall.
I ought to be at Hooker’s to night. To night also to be at Moore’s,9 but I have forsworn society till I get some of this horrible weight off my brain.
RI MS JT/1/TYP/9/2885
IC HP 8:31
Typed Transcript Only
[28 November 1856]: the date is given based on Tyndall’s letter to Rudolf Clausius of 27 November 1856 (a Thursday), in which he also requested information about Agassiz’s map (letter 1302), and Clausius’s reply of 2 December (letter 1305), suggesting that this letter (written on a ‘Friday night’) falls in between.
Agassiz’s ‘Etudes sur les Glaciers’: L. Agassiz, Nouvelles études et expériences sur les glaciers actuels (Paris: Victor Masson, 1847).
Aar: see letter 1305, n. 2.
A map: see letter 1302, n. 11.
an engineer named Wild: Johannes Wild, see letter 1302, n. 10.
the ‘Pavillion’: in 1844 Daniel Dollfuss-Ausset (see letter 1310, n. 5) constructed a hut on the Aar glacier known as Pavillon Dollfuss (HLS). On 22 August 1856 Tyndall and Huxley spent the night at the hut; Tyndall noted in his journal that he ‘listened all night to Huxley snoring. Had no sleep’ (Journal, JT/2/13c/882–4; Glaciers of the Alps, pp. 18–20, 112).
Mrs Huxley: Henrietta Huxley.
Irishism: the fact or quality of being Irish (OED).
Moore’s: James and Harriet Moore and their family Harriet Jane, Julia, John, and Graham.
Please cite as “Tyndall1303,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on