21 Daniel Street | Bath | Sep[tembe]r 16th 1864
My dear John,
So far the Bath meeting1 has been a very pleasant one; to me it is so chiefly in consequence of the presence of our dear Mrs Lubbock2 and the Spottiswoodes.3 Daily they make one dine and breakfast with them and daily Mrs Lubbock asks if I cannot induce you to come. Although on the committee of section A I am not able to provide for the reading of a paper of sufficient interest to demand your presence should such a one be presented I will of course let you know in time to be present. I have this day taken an unusually active part, for me, in public proceedings. I have had a discussion with Cayley, the president,4 on Chasles’5 late work.6 It was of course an amicable one and what I had to say was well received both by the President and the audience. I found (entre nous7) that I was rather more conversant with Chasles method than anyone else in the room; and that I was enabled to inform Cayley himself, that his own communication had been anticipated and stated even in a more general form by Chasles himself.
I then made a communication on my own present researches,8 which was equally well received and drew from the President some excellent remarks, geometrical as well as complimentary. Ellis9 followed me and was by no means so successful. He is a man full of crotchets, too crotchetty to do good work with present methods and ambitious to invent methods of his own; he lacks the faculty of seeing that the world perfectly indifferent about his crotchets and thus makes himself a bore. Colenso10 is here we put him on the committee of Section A (in consequence of his good arithmetical work I suppose). He is to dine with us at Lubbocks in half an hour so I must say Good Bye. You will come if you can.
Yours ever | T. A. Hirst
RI MS JT/1/H/250
Bath meeting: the BAAS held its thirty-fourth meeting in Bath from September 15–20 1864 (Brit. Assoc. Rep. 1864).
Mrs Lubbock: Ellen Lubbock.
Spottiswoodes: William Spottiswoode and his wife Eliza Taylor Spottiswoode (née Arbuthnot, 1837–94).
Cayley, the president: Arthur Cayley (1821–95), a British mathematician who helped found the modern British school of pure mathematics (ODNB). During this meeting he was President of Section A, mathematics and physics.
Chasles: see letter 1994, n. 7.
late work: Chasles published a number of mathematical papers in 1864, so we cannot be certain to which this refers (see Catalogue of Scientific Papers, Compiled and Published by the Royal Society of London (1864–1873.), 6 vols (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1877), vol. 7, pp. 375–6).
entre nous: between us (French).
communication on my own present researches: T. A. Hirst, ‘On a Generalization of the method of Geometrical Inversion’, Brit. Assoc. Rep. 1864, p. 3–4).
Ellis: Alexander John Ellis (see letter 1991, n. 1).
Colenso: John William Colenso (1814–83), a British mathematician, theologian, Biblical scholar, and social activist, who was the first Church of England Bishop of Natal. He was influenced by the liberal theologian Frederick Denison Maurice, and sparked controversy over his interpretation of scripture and outspoken stance on such issues as polygamy, the doctrine of eternal damnation, and the route to salvation. He was a polygenist, arguing that the different races of humankind were in fact different species, a view held by a number of notable men of science at this time, although this too was very much a point of contention (ODNB).
Please cite as “Tyndall2138,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on