16. Belgrave Square. | June 1 1864
Dear Tyndall
In my last Anniversary Address to the Geographers1 now going through to press I have a long article versus the power of ice to excavate solid rocks.
It was with glacier subjects brought under my [notice] by descriptions of the glaciers of Tibet & New Zealand I felt compelled to make a declaration of my faith & to differ in toto from my valued friend Ramsay.
In speaking of what Ramsay suggests & believes2 I have added: and Tyndall an eminent physicist, who has opened out new views on the regelation & other properties of ice, has even speculated on its power to have excavated the chief vallies of the Alps as well as the deeper depressions occupied by water”3
I have not read anything of yours to this effect,4 but if you have so spoken or written pray let me know the fact & reference.
Or if not, pray convey to me in a few words as may be, what your opinion is.
Yours sincerely | Rod. I Murchison
In another place I allude to you as writing that “a glacier if not an elastic or viscous bodies, is at all events plastic through the regelation of its fragments” If Hopkins’s fragmentary theory5 was truth y[ou]r line shews how. Is this the fact & if not enlighten me.
My arguments are all purely geological.
RI MS JT/1/M/148
Anniversary Address to the Geographers: R. Murchison, ‘Address to the Royal Geographical Society’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 8 (1863), pp. 170–254.
In speaking of what Ramsay suggests & believes: see letter 2146.
Murchison neglected to use an opening quotation mark for this sentence.
I have not read anything of yours to this effect: two years before, Tyndall had published a short note on the conformation of the Alps (see letter 1921, n. 6). His longer article on the subject would be published later in October 1864: J. Tyndall, ‘On the Conformation of the Alps’, Phil. Mag., 28 (1864), pp. 255–71. In this Tyndall gave the following postscript: ‘The foregoing paper was in the printer’s hands before it was my privilege to read the last Anniversary Address to the Geographical Society by its President, Sir Roderick Murchison. I have since considered the arguments, and given, I trust, due weight to the authorities urged and cited in that excellent Address against the theory of erosion, as applied to the valleys of the Alps. But the effect on my mind is not such as to induce me to alter the opinions, based on observed facts, which I have ventured to express in these pages’ (p. 271).
Hopkins’s fragmentary theory: see letter 1908, n. 1.
Please cite as “Tyndall2100,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on