Cambridge | March 23rd 1857.
My dear Sir,
I believe that the course which you propose I should take1 respecting my own memoir on Glacial Motion, may be the best, both as regard my own claims on the subject, and as likely to afford the most effective support to your views. I have felt unwilling to write again on the subject in any way which might involve me in controversy with such men as Forbes and Whewell,2 neither of whom I am convinced can carry on a controversy without a large spice of ill-humoured feeling whether it be openly displayed or not. Forbes will as a matter of course either attack your theory3 or claim a large part of it as involved in his own,4 and Whewell is not unlikely to back him up, especially if he find me supporting you. However whatever I think right to be said for the advancement of scientific truth I will say. At the same time I should be sorry that it should in any degree appear that I was claiming any thing which you and Huxley were not previously and fully prepared to allow me. I think, therefore, it would be better just in a single passage to express your belief that your results and theory would be found in strict accordance with the results which I had obtained by strict mechanical reasoning on the internal pressures and tensions of glaciers.
I am glad to hear you are going to visit the Mer de Glace.5 It will probably enable you to meet Forbes’s arguments much more effectively in detail than you could otherwise do. I omitted to return you his note6 which I have now enclosed. I hope he may now have discovered that one might reasonably expect to assert one’s own opinions and dissent from those of others on scientific subjects without being supposed to give just cause of offence. Nous verrons.7 I can hardly guess what arguments he will bring against your theory, but so long as you keep within your own proper defences, I am satisfied of your impregnability.
Believe me | Yours very truly | W. Hopkins.
RI MS JT/1/H/505
LT Typescript Only
the course which you propose I should take: letter missing, but likely referring to Hopkins’ lengthy paper published a few years later: W. Hopkins, ‘On the Theory of the Motion of Glaciers’, Phil. Trans., 152 (1862), pp. 677–745.
Whewell: William Whewell (1794–1866), English philosopher and historian of science, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and author of, among many other books, History of the Inductive Sciences, 3 vols (London: John W. Parker, 1837) and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History, 2 vols (London: John W. Parker, 1840). In 1833, Whewell coined the term scientist (ODNB).
your theory: see letter 1306, n. 10.
in his own: see letter 1306, n. 8.
Mer de Glace: see letter 1306, n. 12.
his note: letter 1349.
Nous verrons: we shall see (French).
Please cite as “Tyndall1359,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on