To John Frederick William Herschel   2nd. March 1857

Royal Institution of Great Britain [stamped] | 2^nd. March 1857

Dear Sir.

I send you a brief sketch of a lecture on the structure & motion of glaciers,¹ though in all probability you will have already seen the substance of it in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.² The time which we spent upon the glaciers was far too short to enable me to do more than express in a general manner the causes to which I believe the phenomena referred to are due. As you very well know such a question always has its ‘residual phenomena’. and these I trust will be dealt with in a satisfactory manner before the question is relinquished. There is a great deal to be done towards the development of the physical properties of ice. In the paper I have been compelled to dwell very briefly upon this question, but I am still engaged on it, and hope by the application of polarized light and other tests to lay firmer hold of the subject. As a mechanical question the cleavage of the ice³ is very interesting; but in the paper I have almost restricted myself to shewing that by bringing the forces acknowledged to be at work in a glacier to bear upon ice, on a small scale, the same results are produced. The minor changes which accompany this result, or rather of which the cleavage is the resultant expression I have not particularly dwelt upon, because they form the subject of my present and future enquiries.

I hope to see the paper of which an abstract is given in the ‘proceedings’ printed in full in the Phil. Trans.⁴ When this is done it will give me pleasure to send you a copy, and that pleasure will be greatly increased if you should find in the memoir nothing unworthy of the calm and Philosophic Spirit in which such a question should be treated, and of which your own writings furnish the best example

Believe me dear Sir | most truly yours | John Tyndall

RS HS 17.385