Royal Institution. | Thursday.
My dear Huxley
I have just received the Westminster2 and looked simply at the last paragraph of your article.3 My head, which is awfully out of order, would permit me to do no more; but I cannot help expressing to you the great admiration which the passage4 excited within me. —It is really magnificent.
Ever Yours | John Tyndall
Imperial College Huxley Collection 8.282
RI MS JT/1/TYP/9/3157
[April 1860]: The Imperial College Huxley Collection dated this letter to April 1860, in part because the type-written letter included a handwritten note ‘?April 1860’. The date fits with the publication of Huxley’s review of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, which appeared in the Westminster Review in April 1860.
the Westminster: The Westminster Review was a radical quarterly.
your article: Presumably T. H. Huxley ‘Art.VIII.-Darwin on the Origin of Species’, Westminster Review, 17 (April 1860), pp. 541–70.
the passage: the last sentence of Huxley’s review reads as follows: ‘And viewed as a whole, we do not believe that, since the publication of Von Baer’s “Researches on Development,” thirty years ago, any work has appeared calculated to exert so large an influence, not only on the future of Biology, but in extending the domination of Science over regions of thought into which she has, as yet, hardly penetrated’. T. H. Huxley. ‘Art.VIII. —Darwin on the Origin of Species’, Westminster Review, 17 (April 1860), p. 570.
Please cite as “Tyndall1697,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on