Royal Institution of Great Britain | Wednesday
My dear Becker,
It gives me pleasure to learn that you are once more on English soil: you ought never to have quitted it; you have here the best air, the best beef, the best mutton which the world can produce, and these are the substratum of all manly achievements & of all happiness attainable by man. Why then should you quit this land to bury yourself in that sandy waste on which frowns the shadow of the Kreuzberg3 and according to Dove,4 “Der Staub bisweilen zum Meteor wird.”5
Well I am happy to find you here again. I send you the required information.6 My first Friday evening7 will be something about the atmosphere after Easter I purpose giving 7 Lectures on sound8
Yours ever | John Tyndall
Don’t be angry at my discriminations of Germany—Old Marburg9 is still dear to me & so are many other memories of ‘der Vaterland’10
RI MS JT/1/T/140
[Bernard Henry] Becker: Bernard Henry Becker (1833–1900), a journalist and science writer, most famous for his publication of Scientific London (1874), in which he detailed many of the famous meetings of Britain’s scientific academies and their most noted members, such as John Tyndall (Modern English Biography).
[26 November 1862]: the date ‘26/11 62’, indeed a Wednesday, is penciled in on the original letter, presumably by LT.
that sandy waste on which frowns the shadow of the Kreuzberg: presumably Berlin.
Dove: Dove, Heinrich Wilhelm (1803–79), a Prussian meteorologist and experimental physicist. He was educated at the University of Berlin and became an ordinary professor at Berlin’s Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in 1845. In his research, he focused on meteorology and was awarded the RS’s Copley Medal in 1853 for his contributions to understanding the distribution of heat in the atmosphere (CDSB).
Der Staub bisweilen zum Meteor wird : a speck of dust sometimes becomes a meteor (German).
required information: presumably Tyndall sent an enclosure detailing his RI lectures.
My first Friday evening: Tyndall delivered a Friday Evening Discourse, ‘On Radiation through the Earth’s Atmosphere’, at the RI on 23 January 1863 (Roy. Inst. Proc., 4 (1862–6), pp. 4–8). This was also published as J. Tyndall, ‘Radiation through the Earth’s Atmosphere’, Phil. Mag., 25 (1863), pp. 200–6.
Lectures on sound: Tyndall delivered seven lectures on the topic of sound at the RI in 1863, on Tuesdays at 3pm from 28 April through 9 June (RI Guard Book, vol. 3, p. 26).
Marburg: a university town north of Frankfurt, where Tyndall completed his doctorate at the University of Marburg in 1850.
‘der Vaterland’: the Fatherland (German).
Please cite as “Tyndall1948,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on