Monday night | June 1862
My dear Lubbock
I was aiming to see you & to arrange with you the character of your baggage and the mode of carrying it. I had arranged with Huxley to go to Grindelwald.2 He starts tomorrow, I start on Friday & we hoped that you would join us there three days after my arrival:3—Then we had arranged to cross the Scheideck together march on to the Grimsel, scramble over the Rhone glacier up the Galenstock and afterwards to cross the Oberaarjoch to the Aeggishorn—whence our way would lead towards the Monte Rosa chain. But this general arrangement blots out all—We thought that [1 word illeg] you would go straight to Bale4 thence to Thun and instead of being at Geneva, that you would be at Grindelwald on the 10th. There are many chances against our meeting at all, or being able to do any thing together. No plan save the vaguest general general5 one can be made.
In the first half of July we intend to accomplish what I have stated & about the 20th I shall be at Breuil on the Italian side of the Alps.—you love the lakes & I love the mountains & thus I fear our places are not going to harmonize.
Kindest regards to Mrs Lubbock6—I wish she had put an extinguisher on Mr Morlot!7
Yours ever | John Tyndall
BL Add MS 49639, ff. 103–4
[30]: the day is given as Tyndall left London on Friday, 4 July 1862, with the preceding Monday being 30 June.
Grindelwald: see letter 1907, n. 5.
three days after my arrival: date uncertain, but around 8 July.
Bale: Basle, or Basel, a town in Switzerland, close to the borders with France and Germany (Bale is the French spelling).
general: word repeated by Tyndall.
Mrs Lubbock: Ellen Lubbock.
Mr Morlot: possibly Charles Adolph Morlot (1820–67), a Swiss archeologist (HLS).
Please cite as “Tyndall1909,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on