16th Dec. 1857.
My dear Sir
It is very kind of you to send me your circular2 though I do not belong to the Alpine Club.3 The reasons which prevent me I have given in my note to Mr. Mathews.4 I ask to be excused simply for the sake of my pursuits, and I hope that the scientific side of the Alpine question will not suffer by this arrangement
I shall take an interest in your proceedings and if permitted shall be glad to join you from time to time.
Do you not think that one black ball in five gives a great preponderance to the dissentient? Sometimes men in a club do things through a mere spurt of ill temper. This rule would always place a very great power in the hands of a very small number of members—Would you not think one black ball in three a sufficient security?
If rule VII5 is to stand might it not be modified thus ‘ascended a mountain to the height of 13000 feet’? It is the elevation I suppose that gives the claim not the reaching of the ‘top’ of the Mountain. Mr. Coleman,6 for example, once lost his baton on the grand plateau7 and was obliged to return without reaching the summit of Mont Blanc.8 Would not this be a sufficient claim upon his part even though he had not afterwards reached the top of the mountain?
This bit of information I gleaned from a document in the hut of the Grands Mulets.9
Yours very truly | John Tyndall
Alpine Club
Edward Kennedy: Edward Shirley Kennedy (1817–98), an English mountaineer and founding member of the Alpine Club. See C. E. M., ‘In Memoriam. Edward Shirley Kennedy’, Alpine Journal, 19 (1898), pp.152–6.
your circular: see letter 1459, n. 4.
I do not belong to the Alpine Club: for the Alpine Club, see letter 1459, n. 5. While Tyndall wrote that he did not belong to the club, the club in fact had not been formed. In letter 1459, William Mathews informed Tyndall ‘that several active mountaineers are about to form “an alpine club”’.
my note to Mr. Mathews: letter missing (a reply to letter 1459). William Mathews, see letter 1459, n. 1.
rule VII: see letter 1459, n. 7.
Mr. Coleman: Edmund Thomas Coleman (1824–92), an alpine mountaineer and artist (see ‘Founders of the Alpine Club’, in ODNB). He published Scenes from the Snow-fields; being Illustrations of the Upper Ice-world of Mont Blanc, from Sketches Made on the Spot in the Years 1855, 1856, 1857, 1858 (London: Longman, Brown, 1859). He would later climb in the Cascade Range in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
the grand plateau: a relatively flat region on the north side of Mont Blanc, beyond the Grand Mulets.
Mont Blanc: see letter 1320, n. 6.
Grand Mulets: see letter 1419, n. 9.
Please cite as “Tyndall1466,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on