12 NATURAL SCIENCE. Jan.. 



in Jermyn Street. The year 1853 "^^^ an important one in Tyndall's 

 life. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society ; and at the 

 instance of Dr. Bence Jones he gave the first of his long series of 

 lectures at the Royal Institution ; and shortly afterwards Faraday 

 gained for him the appointment of Professor of Natural Philosophy 

 at the Royal Institution, with which Society he remained connected 

 till his retirement in 1887. For the last 20 years of this period he 

 was, in addition. Superintendent of the Laboratory there, to which 

 office he succeeded on the death of Faraday in 1867. 



During his student days in Germany Tyndall made a visit to the 

 Alps, and the impression they made upon him was ineffaceable. He 

 went back, in company with Professor Huxley, in 1856, in order to 

 study some glacial problems, and from that year onwards rarely 

 missed a visit to Switzerland. To his scientific work there reference 

 will be made later on ; but no sketch of his life would be complete 

 which did not consider the Alpine feats of which he was so justly 

 proud. He was one of the early group of mountain climbers, and 

 one of the most successful of the band of Englishmen who led 

 the attack on the more dangerous of the giants of the Alps. He 

 must have been a man of splendid physique and sound judgment, or 

 he must inevitably have come to grief during some of his reckless 

 feats. No doubt most of Tyndall's early ascents and glacier expe- 

 ditions had a scientific purpose ; but they were carried out with reck- 

 less disregard for life and limb, and he did many things for which he 

 would nowadays get his knuckles rapped pretty briskly in the pages 

 of the Alpine Journal. Such, for example, are his ascent of the Jungfrau 

 alone, without a greatcoat, and with only a light alpenstock, which he 

 lost on the top. A still more daring deed was his first ascent of the 

 west point of the Dufour-Spitz — the highest peak of Mte. Rosa — from 

 the Riffel ; in the only previous ascent of this point the party consisted 

 of five first-class English climbers, Ulrich Lauener, and three other 

 guides, and they went up, moreover, by the west arete. Tyndall did it 

 absolutely alone. 



His greatest Alpine achievement was the first ascent of the 

 Weisshorn from Bies in 1861, in which he vv^as accompanied by 

 Wenger and the old guide who still lives at Zermatt, and has ever 

 since been known as " Weisshorn Bennen." In his attacks on the 

 Matterhorn he was less successful ; but for long he held the highest 

 record before the summit was actually reached. He was the third to 

 gain the top, and the first who crossed the mountain from Breil to 

 Zermatt ; it was in a ten minutes' rest on the arete during this 

 traverse that he thought out the exquisite little prose poem, " Musings 

 upon the Matterhorn." Three years later he made the third modern 

 traverse of the very difficult glacier pass known as the " Old Weiss- 

 thor," by a variation on the previous routes, and crossing above the 

 Filar glacier. The last and most difficult of his first ascents was in 

 1862, when he climbed from Breil with the guides, Bennen, Carrel, 



