640 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



about the Jamaica revolt and Governor Eyre, I am afraid that, if 

 things had been pushed to extremities over that unfortunate busi- 

 ness, each of us would have been capable of sending the other to 

 the block. But the sentence would have been accompanied by- 

 assurances of undiminished respect and affection ; and I have 

 faith that we should not have spoiled our lives by quarreling over 

 the inevitable. 



Carlyle's extraordinary peculiarities of style, even at his worst, 

 were not, to me, the stumbling-blocks which they often proved 

 to other people, who, in their irritation, would talk of them as 

 affectations. Even admitting them to be indefensible, it seems to 

 me that if he is chargeable with affectation at all (and I do not 

 think he is), it is rather when he writes the classical English, say, 

 of the Life of Schiller. As any one who ever heard Carlyle talk 

 knows, the style natural to him was that of The Diamond Neck- 

 lace.* These observations have a bearing on the adverse criticisms 

 of a like kind, to which Tyndall was sometimes subjected. Modes 

 of speech and action which some called mannerisms, or even af- 

 fectations, were, in fact, entirely natural ; and showed themselves 

 in full force, sometimes with a very droll effect, in the smallest 

 gathering of intimate friends, or with one or two on a hillside, 

 from whom abundant chaff was the only response likely to come. 

 I say, once more, Tyndall was not merely theoretically, but prac- 

 tically, above all things sincere; the necessity of doing, at all 

 hazards, that which he judged, rightly or wrongly, to be just and 

 proper, was the dominant note of his character ; and he was in- 

 fluenced by it in his manner of dealing with questions which 

 might seem, to men of the world, hardly worth taking so seri- 

 ously. Of the controversies in which he became involved, some 

 of the most troublesome were undertaken on behalf of other peo- 

 ple who, as he conceived, had been treated with injustice. The 

 same instinct of veracity ran through all Tyndall's scientific 

 work. That which he knew, he knew thoroughly, had turned 

 over on all sides, and probed through and through. Whatever 

 subject he took up, he never rested till he had attained a clear 

 conception of all the conditions and processes involved, or had 

 satisfied himself that it was not attainable. And in dealing with 

 physical problems, I really think that he, in a manner, saw the 

 atoms and molecules, and felt their pushes and pulls. A pro- 

 found distrust of all long chains of deductive reasoning (outside 



* In reading the very positive conclusions, based upon differences of style, about the 

 authorship of ancient writings, enunciated by some critics, I have sometimes wondered 

 whether, if the two pieces to which I have alluded had come down to us as anonymous 

 ancient manuscripts, the demonstration that they were written by different persons might 

 not have been quite easy. 



