Royal Institution of Great Britain | Tuesday Ev[enin]g.
My dear Francis.
Would you think the following alterations of a word worth making?
I have said in one of my paragraphs: ‘Hitherto Dr. Akin2 has done nothing but read & write &c’ for the word ‘nothing’ use the word little. I intended making this change this morning but it escaped my memory—Could it appear as an erratum?3
If not for this number perhaps you would kindly take a note of it for the next.
Yours very sincerely | John Tyndall
St Bride Library, Authors’ letters
[December 20th 1864]: in his journal entry for 16 December 1864 Tyndall noted that he showed his intended reply to Akin to Huxley, Pollock, and Hirst. On Saturday, 17 December, he noted that he had sent it to the printer. The following Tuesday was 20 December 1864.
Dr. Akin: this letter is a part of the ongoing dispute between Tyndall and the Hungarian physicist C.K. Akin (see n. 3 below and the introductory essay to this volume).
I have said in one of my paragraphs… an erratum?: in fact this change was made before the article went to press, see J. Tyndall, ‘On the History of Negative Fluorescence’, Phil. Mag., 29 (1865), pp. 44–55 (this line appears on p. 49). This article, an important one in the dispute between Tyndall and Akin, in which Tyndall recounted his account of the history of their respective works, directly followed C. K. Akin’s ‘On Calcesence’, Phil. Mag.,29 (1865), pp. 28–43. For further commentary and context see the introductory essay of this and the ninth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall. See also letters 1925, 2075, 2076, 2079, 2114, 2162, 2167, 2168, 2170, 2173, 2182, 2183, 2190, 2197, 2201, 2204, 2208, and 2214.
Please cite as “Tyndall2198,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on