;o8 



NATURE 



[March 31, 1892 



ugly " — a fact which seems to be due to their poor food 

 and roving life. 



Both books are illustrated, and each is supplied with a 

 map. The map accompanying Dr. Junker's volume does 

 not indicate his routes, which the reader, therefore, often 

 finds some difficulty in tracing. 



PROFESSOR TYNDALVS LA TEST BOOK. 

 New Fragments. By John Tyndall, F.R.S. (London : 



Longmans, 1892.) 

 Tl /■£ have here a miscellaneous collection dealing 

 ^ ^ with various subjects — scientific, theological, bio- 

 graphic, and autobiographic. Some of the papers are 

 lectures delivered at the Royal Institution or elsewhere, 

 some are magazine articles, and a few have been added 

 for the present volume. 



The personal recollections of Thomas Carlyle will 

 be read with interest, especially the account of his journey 

 to Edinburgh and the delivery of his Rectorial address. 



The article on Pasteur sketches with keen apprecia- 

 tion the remarkable series of investigations which, begin- 

 ning with the optical properties of unsymmetric crystals, 

 were diverted by circumstances to the life-history of 

 microscopic organisms, and the nature of fermentation. 



The sketch of the remarkable career of Count Rumford 

 derives increased interest from local information gathered 

 during a visit to the scenes of Rumford's boyhood in 

 New England. 



The lecture on Thomas Young contains a vivid de- 

 lineation of his personal qualities, and, besides tracing 

 his achievements in physical science, gives a very clear 

 and intelligible account of the methods by which he 

 succeeded in deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphics. 

 In the accompanying narrative, his openness and plain 

 dealing are strongly contrasted with the crafty suppres- 

 sions of his rival, Champollion, who, being a professional 

 antiquarian, appears to have thought it intolerable that 

 he should be beaten in his own special province by an 

 outsider. 



To many readers, the most interesting portions of the 

 " Fragments" will be those which are autobiographic. 



An address, delivered at the Birkbeck Institution in 

 1884, contains a sketch of Prof. Tyndall's early career, 

 first as a draughtsman in the Ordnance Survey, then as 

 an Ordnance surveyor in the field, next as a railway sur- 

 veyor in the rush of work which sprung from the "railway 

 mania." Here is a specimen of his recollections of that 

 date : — 



"Among the legal giants of those days, Austin and 

 Talbot stood supreme. There was something grand, as 

 well as merciless, in the power wielded by those men in 

 entangling and ruining a hostile witness ; and yet it often 

 seemed to me that a clear-headed fellow, who had the 

 coolness, honesty, and courage not to go beyond his 

 knowledge, might have foiled both of them. Then we 

 had the giants of the civil engineers — Stephenson, Brunei, 

 Locke, Hawkshaw, and others. Judged by his power of 

 fence, his promptness in calcuhtion, and his general 

 readiness of retort, George Bidder as a witness was un- 

 rivalled. I have seen him take the breath out of Talbot 

 himself before a Committee of the House of Lords. 

 Strong men were broken down by the strain and labour 

 of that arduous time. Many pushed through, and are 

 still amongst us in robust vigour. But some collapsed ; 

 while others retired with large fortunes it is true, but 



NO. I I 70, VOL. 45] 



with intellects so shattered that, instead of taking their 

 places in the front rank of English statesmen, as their 

 abilities entitled them to do, they sought rest for their 

 brains in the quiet lives of country gentlemen. In my 

 own modest sphere, I well remember the refreshment 

 occasionally derived from five minutes' sleep on a deal 

 table, with Babbage and Callet's ' Logarithms ' under 

 my head for a pillow." 



We next find him as a master at Queenwood College, 

 Hants, where he had Frankland for a colleague. 



" Queenwood College had been the Harmony Hall of 

 the Socialists, which, under the auspices of the phil- 

 anthropist, Robert Owen, was built to inaugurate the 

 ! Millennium. The letters ' C. of M.,' Commencement of 

 I Millennium, were actually inserted in flint in the brick- 

 work of the house." 



Having saved some two or three hundred pounds, he 

 went with Frankland in 1848 to study science in Ger- 

 many, and selected Marburg as a place where he could 

 live cheaply amid agreeable surroundings. Here, if the 

 mists of intervening years have not unduly magnified the 

 past, we must believe that he worked without weariness 

 for sixteen hours a day. There were about three hundred 

 students. Bunsen was the Professor of Chemistry, and 

 appears to have given great prominence to chemical 

 physics. His lectures included the electric telegraph, 

 and a very full exposition of Ohm's law ; and in the 

 department of heat he made complimentary references 

 to Joule. 



In process of time our student began to make original 

 investigations, and his first paper was on the phenomena 

 of water-jets. It included the remark that the musical 

 sound of cascades and rippling streams, as well as the 

 sonorous voice of the ocean, was mainly if not wholly 

 due to the breaking of air bladders entangled in the 

 water. 



After taking his degree at Marburg, he came over to 

 England, but soon returned with his friend the late Prof. 

 Hirst to Germany, where he studied at Berlin under 

 Magnus, and met Dove, Ehrenberg, Mitscherlich, Du 

 Bois-Reymond, Wiedemann, Clausius, Poggendorff, and 

 Humboldt. 



The happy associations of University life strengthened 

 the predilections which originally attracted him to Ger- 

 many, and he professes great admiration for the German 

 character, which, alike in science and in war, aims not at 

 glory, but at the discharge of duty. 



Further gossip of an autobiographical kind is furnished 

 under the head of " Old Alpine Jottings," which occupy 

 the last seventy pages of the volume. Here we find him 

 recruiting exhausted nature, after intellectual toil, by 

 arduous climbing on icy slopes, over fearful precipices, 

 and under a fusillade of boulders shooting down from 

 the heights above. 



Perhaps the most vigorous piece of writing in the book 

 is that which is placed first — a lecture on Sabbath ob- 

 servance, delivered in 1880 before the Glasgow Sunday 

 Society ; and we must not omit to mention the second 

 article, which gives a very full account of Goethe's work 

 on colour. It pays a high tribute to Goethe's acuteness 

 as an observer, but gives an unsparing exposure of his 

 weakness as a scientific theorist. 



The volume, though not ambitious, contains much 

 pleasant reading. J. D. E. 



