Burlington House1 | Nov 10th 1864
My dear Tyndall,
Being as you properly observe both civil & obliging I have looked over the attendance at the Club2 since Oct 1863 & find that the two luminaries Tyndall & Stokes were in conjunction at the subjoined dates. As to any phenomena attending this conjunction I find no record, which is very strange—
Nov 26th
Feb 25th
The Comet Tyndall was also present on the
29th Oct 1863
26th May 1864 & the Planet Stokes on March 17th 1864
Hoping this may be satisfactory I am—
Yours devotedly | G. Busk
RI MS JT/1/B/162
RI MS JT/1/TYP/1/178
Burlington House: location of the RS.
the Club the Philosophical Club of the RS (see letter 2045, n. 3). The significance of this letter is that it appears to be a reply to a question from Tyndall regarding when he and Stokes had both attended the Philosophical Club on the same evening (Busk had been Treasurer of the club since 1863). In the context of his ongoing debate with Akin, it can only be that he was trying to date the sequence of events regarding when he had first heard of Akin’s interest in ray-transmission and his discussion of the same with Stokes. Tyndall wrote a history of his interactions with Akin in his article ‘On the History of Calorescence’, Phil. Mag., 29 (1865), pp. 218–31. For further discussion of the priority dispute between Tyndall and Akin, see letters 1925, 2075, 2076, 2079, 2114, 2162, 2167, 2168, 2170, 2182, 2183, 2190, 2197, 2198, 2201, 2204, 2208, 2214, the introductory essay for this volume and letters in the forthcoming ninth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall.
Please cite as “Tyndall2173,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on