Dear Dr Tyndall
If you can will you kindly let me have two tickets for your lecture next Friday3 for myself & my sister Mrs Lyell.4 Sir Charles5 has his own admission. I am curious to hear about the Mont Blanc6 Glaciers. We were only in the Zermatt7 once last autumn
Very truly y[ou]rs | Mary E Lyell | 53. Harley St. W. | 18. Jany
RI MS JT/1/L/61
RI MS JT/1/TYP/3/844
Mary E. Lyell: Mary Elizabeth Lyell (née Horner, 1808–73), geologist, conchologist, and wife and scientific partner to Charles Lyell . See M. Ogilvie and J. Harvey (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 2000), vol. 2, pp. 813–4.
[1857]: the year is given by the reference to Tyndall’s Friday evening lecture on glaciers on 23 January 1857.
your lecture next Friday: on 23 January 1857, Tyndall lectured at the RI on ‘Observations on Glaciers’.
my sister Mrs Lyell: Katharine Murray Lyell (née Horner, 1817–1915), Mary’s younger sister, a botanist, married Charles Lyell’s younger brother Henry. In 1870, she published A Geographical Handbook of All the Known Ferns: With Tables to Show Their Distribution (London: John Murray) See M. Ogilvie and J. Harvey (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 2000), vol. 2, p. 813.
Sir Charles: Charles Lyell.
Mont Blanc: the highest mountain in the Alps, on the border between France and Italy. During the period covered by this volume, Mont Blanc was located within the Duchy of Savoy, a part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, precursor to the unified Italian state established in 1861. Savoy was annexed to France in 1860 through the Treaty of Turin.
Zermatt: see letter 1297, n. 7.
Please cite as “Tyndall1320,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on