Cambridge | May 29. 60
My dear Sir,
I was just finishing the last pages I have received of your “Glaciers”1 when your note2 reached me this morning. I return them without further delay, with a few annotations, of very minor importance, which I have made. Any other sheets you may send for my inspection, should you wish it, address to me St. Peter’s Coll. Camb., if sent on or before Thursday. If later, my address will be 3 Belvoir Terrace, | Scarboro’.
The style of your book is I think very happy for popular reading, and the work will be far superior to any other I know, for giving at once a correct and popular acquaintance with glaciers and their phenomena. Some of the discussions on the theories of sound, light, and heat may hardly appear perhaps to have a sufficiently obvious relation to “Glaciers”, and may appear, I think, to some readers rather discrepant, unless you could include them, as it were, in your table; so as to intimate (if it could be done with sufficient brevity) that the work would contain some explanations of physical principles applicable to Glacier Phenomena. Or possibly this might be much better done explicitly in your introduction. But you will best judge of this.3
Yours will be the first work in which any thing like justice has been done to Rendu.4 If Forbes knew his writings, (as I doubt not he did), he has acted most unworthily towards him.5 But it is the same want of candour which he showed towards Agassiz.
Yours truly | W. Hopkins.
RI MS JT/1/TYP/2/616
LT Transcript Only
your “Glaciers”: the manuscript or proof pages of Glaciers of the Alps, see also letter 1595, n. 4.
your note: missing.
But you will best judge of this: Tyndall explained his rationale in the preface, Glaciers of the Alps, p. v.
Rendu: see letter 1619, n. 13.
he has acted most unworthily towards him: the question of whether or not Forbes had properly acknowledged Rendu was disputed. Forbes and his friends believed he had; Tyndall and his friends believed the opposite. See e.g. N. K. L. Kaalund, ‘A frosty disagreement: John Tyndall, James David Forbes, and the early formation of the X-Club’, Annals of Science, 74 (2017), pp. 282–98, on p. 289.
Please cite as “Tyndall1708,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on