PROFESSOR TYNDALL, 643 



bride " whicli was rather hard upon plain folk, married twenty- 

 one years, and blessed with, seven children to boot.* 



My friend's exploits as a mountaineer are sufficient evidence of 

 his extraordinary physical vigor. I could manage a fair day's 

 work in reasonable up-and-down walking myself, but I lacked his 

 caprine sureness of head and foot ; and, when it came to climbing, 

 I was nowhere beside him. By way of compensation, I stood the 

 wear and tear of London life better, though I had not much to 

 boast of, even in that respect. From the first, Tyndall suffered 

 from sleeplessness, with the nervous irritability which is fre- 

 quently cause and consequence of that distressing malady. It is 

 not uncommon for this state of the nervous system to find a vent 

 in fits of ill temper ; but, looking back over all the long years of 

 our close intercourse, I can not call to mind any serious manifes- 

 tations of that sort in my friend. Tyndall " consumed his own 

 smoke " better than most people, and though that faculty is worthy 

 of the highest admiration, I suspect that the exercise of it tells a 

 good deal upon the furnace. When things got bad with him, his 

 one remedy was to rush off to the nearest hills and walk himself 

 into quietude. Pleasant are the recollections, for me and others, 

 of such hard tramps, it might be in the Lake country, or in the 

 Isle of Wight ; in the Peak of Derbyshire, or in Snowdonia. On 

 such excursions Tyndall was the life of the party, content with 

 everything and ready for anything, from philosophical discussion 

 and high-flying poetics, to boyish pranks and gymnastic comic- 

 alities. 



Sometimes we traveled further afield. Thus, in 1856, we made 

 an expedition to Switzerland which had a large influence on Tyn- 

 dall's future. In 1845 I had my first view of a glacier, at the head 

 of the Lac de Gaube in the Pyrenees ; and when, ten years later, 

 I was led to interest myself seriously in geology, in connection 

 with the study of fossils, I read all I could lay hands on about 

 these curious rivers of ice. At the same time Tyndall was occu- 

 pied with his important investigations into the effects of pressure 

 in giving rise to lamination, and I naturally heard a good deal 

 about what he was doing. It struck me that his work might 

 throw some light upon the production of the veined structure of 

 glacier ice ; and one day, when he was dining with us, I mentioned 

 the notion that had come into my head. The upshot was that we, 

 then and there, agreed to go and look into the facts of the case for 

 ourselves. More suo,\ he would have nothing to do with specula- 

 tion till that essential preliminary operation had been effected. 



* I have just received the report of a sermon, delivered on the 15th of December, 1893, 

 by a curious curate, who, in his haste to besmirch the dead, abuses " the late Professor 

 Huxley " ! \ After his way. 



