730 



TYNDALL, JOHN. 



of the past." These bold words, so distinctly presided. In his speech of acknowledgment he 

 expressive of a belief in the advanced views of said : " In 1850, during a flying visit from Ger- 



expre 



evolution as taught by Darwin, Huxley, and 

 Spencer, were not allowed to pass unnoticed. 

 Many of the ablest English writers has- 

 tened to reply to the address, and a long 

 and bitter controversy ensued. But this 

 only strengthened the statement of Tyn- 

 dall's views, as he himself has best shown 

 in the " Reply to the Critics of the Belfast 

 Address," issued in 1875, as a preface to a 

 seventh edition of the "Address." But 



many to England, I stood for the first time in 

 the bright presence of Faraday. In February, 



TTNDALL'S STUDY. 



so free an expression of " advanced views " was 

 not without certain disadvantages, and later he 

 wrote : "Few persons at the present day have 

 more distinctly avowed belief in the ' potency of 

 matter,' and few have paid more dearly for that 

 avowal than myself." Indirectly from this con- 

 troversy came an expression of a belief in spon- 

 taneous generation by some writers, followed by 

 a distinct denial of such a possibility by others. 

 Tyndall at first leaned to the positive side of 

 this question, and promptly instituted a series 

 of experiments that yielded negative results. 

 His contributions to this subject were collected 

 as " Essays on the Floating Matter of the Air in 

 Relation to Putrefaction and Infection " (1881). 

 (See " Germ Theory and Spontaneous Genera- 

 tion,'.' in the " Annual Cyclopaedia " for 1878, 

 page 387.) 



A mong his other works are the following : " Fara- 

 day as a Discoverer" (1868)'; " Natural Philosophy 

 in Easy Lessons " (1869) ; " On the Scientific Use of 

 the Imagination " (1870) ; " Fragments of Science 

 for Unscientific People " (1871) ; and " New Frag- 

 ments " (1892). His scientific honors were many. 

 The Royal Society gave him its Rumford medal 

 for his researches in thermodynamics, Cam- 

 bridge gave him the degree of LL. D. in 1855, 

 and Edinburgh similarly honored him in 1866, 

 while Oxford bestowed her D. C. L. upon him in 

 1873. 



In 1887 he retired from the Royal Institution, 

 and at that time was honored with a banquet 

 over which the President of the Royal Society 



1853, I gave my first Friday evening lecture in 

 the Royal Institution, and three months after- 

 ward, on the motion of Faraday, the old chair 

 of Natural Philosophy, which had been filled at 

 the beginning of the century by Thomas Young, 

 was restored, and to it I was elected." 



Subsequently, with the exceptions of his visits 

 to the chalet in the Alps, the remaining years of 

 his life were spent at his home, in Haslemere, 

 Surrey, tenderly cared for by his wife, Lady 

 Louise Charlotte Hamilton, whom he married 

 in 1876. She became his assistant and acted as 

 his secretary and amanuensis. It was during 

 these last years that he so violently expressed 

 his disapprobation of Gladstone's home-rule 

 policy, and in terms so bitter that they were 

 even offensive to some, of Gladstone's most 

 resolute opponents. He was a sufferer from in- 

 somnia and rheumatism, and these may, perhaps, 

 have been the cause of his bitterness. His death 

 was the result of an accident caused by an over- 

 dose of morphine given him by his wife, of whom 

 Huxley so pleasantly writes: Her ' whole life 

 had been, for many years, devoted to the one ob- 

 ject of preserving that of her husband." More 

 than twenty years ago the greatest of living 

 physicists, Helmholtz, of Berlin, said of Tyn- 

 dall: "The greater part of his activity has 

 always been given to scientific investigation, and 

 we owe to him a series of highly original and re- 

 markable researches and discoveries in physics 

 and physical chemistry." Such was the opinion 

 of the greatest of one only a little less great. 



