THE LATE PROFESSOR TYNDALL. 819 



THE LATE PROFESSOR TYNDALL.* 



By HEEBEET SPENCEE. 



A MONO the various penalties entailed by ill-health, a not 

 -^^ infrequent one is the inability to pay the last honors to a 

 valued friend ; and sometimes another is the undue postponement 

 of such tribute to his memory as remains possible. Of both these 

 evils I have just had experience. 



It was, I think, in 1852 that Prof. Tyndall gave at the Royal 

 Institution the lecture by which he won his spurs : proving, as he 

 then did, to Faraday himself, that he had been wrong in denying 

 diamagnetic polarity. I was present at that lecture ; and when 

 iiitroduced to him very shortly after it, there commenced one of 

 those friendships which enter into the fabric of life and leave 

 their marks. Though both had pronounced opinions about most 

 things, and though neither had much reticence, the forty years 

 which have elapsed since we first met witnessed no interruption 

 of our cordial relations. Indeed, during recent years of invalid 

 life suffered by both of us, the warmth of nature characteristic of 

 him has had increased opportunity for manifesting itself. A 

 letter from him, dated November 25th, inquiring my impressions 

 concerning the climate of this place (St. Leonards), raised the 

 hope that something more than intercourse by correspondence 

 would follow ; but before I received a response to my reply there 

 came the news of the sad catastrophe. 



I need not dwell on the more conspicuous of Prof. Tyndall's 

 intellectual traits, for these are familiar to multitudes of readers. 

 His copiousness of illustration, his closeness of reasoning, and his 

 lucidity of statement, have been sufficiently emphasized by others. 

 Here I will remark only on certain powers of thought, not quite 

 so obvious, which have had much to do with his successes. Of 

 these the chief is " the scientific use of the imagination.^^ He has 

 himself insisted upon the need for this, and his own career exem- 

 plifies it. There prevail, almost universally, very erroneous ideas 

 concerning the nature of imagination. Superstitious peoples, 

 whose folklore is full of tales of fairies and the like, are said to 

 be imaginative; while nobody ascribes imagination to the in- 

 ventor of a new machine. Were this conception of imagination 

 the true one, it would imply that, whereas children and savages 

 are largely endowed with it, and whereas it is displayed in a high 

 degree by poets of the first order, it is deficient in those having 

 intermediate types of mind. But, as rightly conceived, imagina- 

 tion is the power of mental representation, and is measured by 



* Reprinted by permission from McClure's Magazine. 



