Cambridge | May 19 ’60
My dear Sir,
I have received certain portions of your work on Glaciers,1 but have not yet had time to make much way into it, which I shall be able to do however in a few days. You speak (p. 286) of having made an experiment on a vertical precipice to ascertain the rates of motion at different depths.2 I infer that this precipice extended down to the bed of the glacier. This is an important point and ought not I think be left to inference. A word or two would correct it.
You ask me whether I would undertake to review it.3 I cannot promise but shall be much disposed to do so, if any good periodical would insert it. I don’t recollect any thing of the kind to have appeared in the Quarterly. If they would take it I would write it; or perhaps if Parker would insert it in Fraser’s Mag. I would not write it for any inferior periodical. Have you any idea whether the Quarterly would accept it. There wants a general review of the whole subject. All that I have seen, full of Forbes and nothing else, have been wretched one-sided things.
I am sorry to hear that your health is banishing you from town. Take care of yourself in time.
Yours truly | W. Hopkins
I have just finished a Review of Darwin for Fraser.4 Tell your friend Huxley he mustn’t quarrel with me for dealing severely with his friend’s theory.5 I like scientific freedom, with personal courtesy, but I hate scientific quarrelling.
RI MS JT/1/TYP/2/615
LT Transcript Only
your work on glaciers: the manuscript or proof pages of Glaciers of the Alps, see also letter 1595, n. 4.
rates of motion at different depths: these measurements are described on pp. 289–93 of Glaciers of the Alps. Tyndall included the sentence ‘Our next care must be to compare the motion of the surface of a glacier with the motion of those parts which lie near its bed’ (p. 289).
You ask me whether I would undertake to review it: letter missing.
I have just finished a Review of Darwin for Fraser: W. Hopkins, ‘Physical theories of the Phenomena of Life’, Fraser’s Magazine, 61 (June 1860), pp. 739–52, and W. Hopkins, ‘Physical theories of the Phenomena of Life. Part II’, Fraser’s Magazine, 62 (July 1860), pp. 74–90.
Tell your friend Huxley he mustn’t quarrel with me for dealing severely with his friend’s theory: Hopkins’s review, while asserting the right of the naturalist to regard the phenomena of life as physical processes, argues regarding the theories of Lamarck and Darwin, that they do not show any ‘very essential difference in the fundamental hypotheses on which the two theories rest as physical theories’. He states his admiration for Darwin’s marshalling of facts, but expresses the view that Lamarck’s theory is preferable to the ‘less aristocratic process’ of Darwin’s theory of continuous variation and natural selection, based on ‘the accident of birth’. In the second part he argues in particular the lack of experimental evidence for the theory, the lack of intermediate forms in the fossil record, and our lack of understanding of the physical causes, i.e. of the ‘molecular forces which govern the combinations of animate matter’.
Please cite as “Tyndall1703,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on