59 Montagu Square | 24th. Jan. 1857.
My dear Tyndall
I was not able to get at you last night to thank you for your lecture1 & to congratulate you upon having solved the vexed question of glacier movement2—& in having escaped not only uninjured but triumphant from the difficult regions… ‘dove la gelata Ruvidamente un’ altra gente fascia’3—You, instead of being tortured by the ice, like Dante’s worst sufferers, have put the ice to the torture of experiment and it answered your question most satisfactorily—The viscous theory,4 which was a great stumbling block—and must have been truly repugnant to the feelings of every one, may be now considered as relegated to the same lumber-room of obsolete theoretical apparatus, in which the crystalline spheres of the old astronomy,5 phlogiston,6 & various other similar things which have done their temporary work may be supposed to repose.
By the bye the same canto of the Inferno,7 from which I have quoted contains an authority for the word ‘regelation’—At Info. 33.v. III you have—
Levatemi dal viso i duri veli,
Sì ch’io sfoghi ’l dolor, che ’l cuor m’impregna,
Un poco pria, che ’l pianto si raggeli—8
I have no doubt but that Dante coined the word—& Lammenais in his French translation9 has adopted it into his own language as ‘regéler’10—
I am sorry that we are not to see you on Tuesday at dinner, but I suppose there is a lady in the case—
I am | Ever yours truly | W. F. Pollock
RI MS JT/1/P/225
RI MS JT/1/TYP/6/1893
your lecture: on 23 January 1857, Tyndall lectured at the RI on ‘Observations on Glaciers’.
the vexed question of glacier movement: see letter 1306, n. 8 and 10.
‘dove la gelata Ruvidamente un’ altra gente fascia’: ‘Further along we went, to where the ice roughly enswathes another class of people’ (Italian), from Canto 33 (line 91–2) of The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: The Italian Text with a Translation in English Blank Verse and a Commentary by Courtney Langdon, 3 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918), vol. 1 (Inferno), p. 381 (originally published in 1321).
The viscous theory: see letter 1306, n. 8.
crystalline spheres of the old astronomy: a reference to the geocentric model of the universe in Greek Antiquity, with Earth at the center and the Sun, planets, and other celestial bodies orbiting on crystalline spheres.
phlogiston: a reference to the theory in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that combustion could be explained by the presence of a fire-like element (phlogiston) that was contained within combustible bodies. This theory was replaced by the oxygen theory of combustion in the eighteenth century.
the Inferno: the first part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (1321), see n. 3.
Levatemi dal viso i duri veli, | Sì ch’io sfoghi ’l dolor, che ’l cuor m’impregna, | Un poco pria, che ’l pianto si raggeli—: ‘remove for me the hard veils on my face, that I may somewhat vent the pain that fills my heart, before the tears freeze up again’ (Italian), from Canto 33 (line 112–4) of The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.
Lammenais in his French translation: Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais (1782–1854), a French priest and philosopher, translated Dante’s The Divine Comedy as La Divine Comédie, but it was not published until after his death (Paris: Didier C and E, 1863).
‘regéler’: to freeze again (French, regeler), in A. G. Collot, A New and Improved Standard French and English and English and French Dictionary (Philadelphia: C. G. Henderson & Co., 1856), p. 706.
Please cite as “Tyndall1322,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on