Saturday
Your friend2 is here, and has been here for the last ten days working as hard as his brain and fingers will let him. The day after my arrival I called at Montagu Square3 and found the shutters up and the house dead. I knew of course what had happened, and gleaned further from the Moores,4 on Thursday that you were safely housed at Freshwater.5
I must be grim with myself this year. I prolonged my stay in Switzerland till my conscience became a terror to me. I waited to join the Swiss Savants at their annual meeting6 and this made my holiday nearly a fortnight longer than it ought to have been. I am now working up my lost time, and must resist all seductions that would take me from my work. I must shut my ears even to you, though when I picture the Cliffs and Downs I am sorely tempted. But I find total abstinence as regards roaming necessary. I am correcting the proofs of a paper7 that I wrote since my return; I have also just finished the proofs8 of a long one which I had written before I went, and my book9 is wholly out of print and the publishers demanding a second edition.10 I am now writing for it.—endeavouring to incorporate in it all that I have done during the last two years. Then my laboratory experiments are calling for me. So that on the whole if I don’t overcome my work it will overcome me.
You got my little note11 from the Stelvio,12 I hope, and you posted the note13 for me to Sir John Herschel. After I wrote to you I was within a hairsbreadth of annihilation—carried away by an avalanche and deposited on the brink of a Chasm which would have made a horrible grave.14 I lost my watch—The little creature lay for three weeks under the snow. I went to seek it & found it, wound it up there & the and the creature came to life & has ticked merrily ever since.15 It is close to post time—give my love to the boys16 & to your husband,17
Goodbye | Yours ever | John Tyndall
I wonder would Carlyle growl at me if I went to see him.
RI MS JT/1/T/1534
[10 September 1864]: the date is given by relation to letter 2133 (dated 8 September 1864, a Thursday) and letter 2135 (dated 11 September 1864, a Sunday). This letter, written on a Saturday, would then be 10 September.
Your friend: Tyndall is referring to himself in reply to Pollock’s enquiry in letter 2133.
Montagu Square: see letter 1954, n. 2.
the Moores: see letter 2126, n. 16.
housed at Freshwater: a town on the Isle of Wight, near where the Pollocks leased Easton Farm.
Swiss Savants at their annual meeting: see letter 2108, n. 3.
a paper: probably J. Tyndall, ‘On the Dynamical Theory of Heat’, Phil. Mag., 27 (1864), pp. 84–91.
the proofs: see letter 2097, n. 3.
my book: Heat as a Mode of Motion.
second edition: see letter 2121, n. 17.
my little note: letter missing. In letter 2135, Pollock wrote that ‘I never got your letter from the Stelvio’.
the Stelvio: a village near the mountain pass of the same name in the Ortler Alps on the border of Switzerland and Italy.
the note: in letter 2135, after noting that she did not receive Tyndall’s letter from the Stelvio, she wrote that ‘consequently I have forwarded nothing to Sir J. Herschel’.
carried away by an avalanche… a horrible grave: in letter 2130, Tyndall recounted this ‘avalanche adventure’ to Ellen Lubbock.
has ticked merrily ever since: this story is told in more detail in Tyndall’s letter to the Times (letter 2145).
the boys: Frederick, Walter, and Maurice Pollock.
your husband: William Frederick Pollock.
Please cite as “Tyndall2134,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on