general, and of one's self in particular, At that time, Tyndall and I had long which is as oil to the waves of life, and been zealous students of Carlyle's is a chief component of the worthier works. "Sartor Resartus" and the kind of tact; indeed, the best reward "Miscellanies " were among the few of the utterer of a small witticism, or books devoured partly by myself, and play upon words, in his presence, was partly by the mighty hordes of cockthe blank, if benevolent, perplexity roaches in my cabin, during the cruise with which he received it. And I suppose that the character-sketch would be incomplete, without an explanation of its peculiarities by a reference to the mixture of two sets of hereditary tendencies, the one eminently Hibernian, the other derived from the stock of the English Bible translator and Reformer.

To those who have been privileged to become intimate with Tyndall, however, sketch and explanation will seem alike inadequate. These superficial characteristics disappeared from view, as the powerful faculties and the high purposes of the mind, on the surface of which they played, revealed themselves. And to those who knew him best, the impression made by even these great qualities might well be less vivid than that left by the warmth of a tenderly affectionate nature.

"If I pull through this it will be all your care, all your doing." These

of the Rattlesnake; and my sense of obligation to their author was then, as it remains, extremely strong. Tyndall's appreciation of the seer of Chelsea was even more enthusiastic; and, in after years, assumed a character of almost filial devotion. The grounds of our appreciation, however, were not exactly the same. My friend, I think, was disposed to regard Carlyle as a great teacher; I was rather inclined to take him as a great tonic; as a source of intellectual invigoration and moral stimulus and refreshment, rather than of theoretical or practical guidance. Half a century ago, the evangelical reaction which, for a time, had braced English society was dying out, and a scum of rotten and hypocritical conventionalism clogged art, literature, science, and politics. I might quarrel with something every few paragraphs, but passing from the current platitudes

words (I give them from memory), to Carlyle's vigorous pages was like uttered the night before his death, being transported from the stucco, were meant for no ear but that of the pavement, and fog of a London street tireless nurse, watcher, secretary, ser- to one of his own breezy moors. The

country was full of boulders and bogs. to be sure, and by no means calculated for building leases; but, oh, the freshness and the freedom of it!

vant, in case of need, to whom they were addressed; and whose whole life had been, for many years, devoted to the one object of preserving that of her husband. Utterly hateful to me as are the violations of a privacy that should be sacred, now too common, I have sought and obtained permission to commit this, and take all responsibility for Roundhead spirit woke up all over

it. For the pitiful circumstances of Tyndall's death are known to all the world; and I think it well that all the world should be enabled to see those circumstances by the light which shines forth, alike on the dead and on the living, from the poor crumpled piece of paper on which these treasured words were, at once, recorded.

But I have wandered far from the year 1851 and its nascent friendships.

Our divergent appreciation of Carlyle foreshadowed the only serious strain to which our friendship was ever exposed. When the old Cavalier and

England about the Jamaica revolt and Governor Eyre, I am afraid that, if things had been pushed to extremities over that unfortunate business, each of us would have been capable of sending the other to the block. But the sentence would have been accompanied by assurances of undiminished respect and affection; and I have faith that we should not have spoiled our lives by quarrelling over the inevitable.

Carlyle's extraordinary peculiarities esses involved, or had satisfied himself that it was not attainable. And in dealing with physical problems, I really think that he, in a manner, saw the atoms and molecules, and felt their pushes and pulls. A profound distrust of all long chains of deductive reasoning (outside mathematics), unless the links could be experimentally or observationally tested at no long inter termed "butter-boat" speeches.

of style, even at his worst, were not, to me, the stumbling-blocks which they often proved to other people, who, in their irritation, would talk of them as affectations. Even admitting them to be indefensible, it seems to me that, if he is chargeable with affectation at all (and I do not think he is), it is rather when he writes the classical English, say, of the "Life of Schiller." As any one who ever heard Carlyle talk knows, vals, was simply another manifestation the style natural to him was that of of the same fundamental quality. I "The Diamond Necklace." 1 These was not overburdened with love for

observations have a bearing on the adverse criticisms of a like kind, to which Tyndall was sometimes subjected. Modes of speech and action which some called mannerisms, or even affectations, were, in fact, entirely natural; and showed themselves in full force, sometimes with a very droll effect, in the smallest gathering of intimate friends, or with one or two on a hillside, from whom abundant chaff was the only response likely to come. I say, once more, Tyndall was not merely theoretically, but practically, above all things sincere; the necessity of doing, at all hazards, that which he judged, rightly or wrongly, to be just and proper, was the dominant note of his character; and he was influenced by it in his manner of dealing with questions which might seem, to men of the world, hardly worth taking so seriously. Of the controversies in which he became involved, some of the most

such dialectic festoon-work myself, but I owe not a little to my friend for helping to abolish as much as remained.

Once again, this quality of active veracity, the striving after knowledge as apart from hearsay, lay at the root of Tyndall's very remarkable powers of exposition, and of his wealth of experimental illustration. Hence, I take it, arose the guarded precision of the substance of a lecture or essay, which was often poetically rich, sometimes even exuberant, in form. In Sir Humphry Davy and Mr. Faraday the Royal Institution had possessed two unsurpassed models of the profound, yet popular, expositor of science. Davy was before my time, but I have often had the delight of listening to Faraday. An ineradicable tendency to think of something else makes me an excellent testobject for oratory; and he was one of the few orators whom I have heard to whom I could not choose but listen.

troublesome were undertaken on be- It was no mean ordeal, therefore, to half of other people who, as he con- which Tyndall was subjected when he ceived, had been treated with injustice. was asked to give a "Friday evening" The same instinct of veracity ran in 1852; but he captured his hearers so through all Tyndall's scientific work. completely that his appointment to the That which he knew, he knew thor- Fullerian professoriate of physics, with

oughly, had turned over on all sides, and probed through and through. Whatever subject he took up, he never rested till he had attained a clear conception of all the conditions and proc

1 In reading the very positive conclusions, based upon differences of style, about the authorship of ancient writings enunciated by some critics, I have sometimes wondered whether, if the two pieces to

Fuimus! The last time I feasted with the Red Lions I was a don myself; the dinner was such as even daintier dons than I might rejoice in; and I know of only one person who, under a grave, even reverend, exterior, lamented the evolution of Red Lionism into respectability.

and very few of the thousands of de-way of counterblast to the official banlighted listeners, I imagine, ever had quets of the Association, with their an inkling of what these facile dis- high tables and what we irreverently courses cost the lecturer. I used to suffer rather badly from "lecturefever" myself; but I never met with any one to whom an impending discourse was the occasion of so much mental and physical disturbance, as it was to Tyndall. He was quite incapable of persuading himself, or of being persuaded by others, that, after all, a relative failure, now and then, was of no great consequence; indeed, from the point of view of pure art, might be desirable. Whatever he gave, it must be the best he had, whether it were a lecture or a dinner. Now that sort of housekeeping costs. But some think with Shakespeare :

The painful warrior, famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories, once foiled,
Is from the book of honor razèd quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he

toiled.

And Tyndall was not minded to be forgot; at any rate, for that reason.

In the autumn of 1851, my friend and I went to the meeting of the Brit

It was at the Ipswich meeting, that Tyndall and I fell in with Hooker, just returned from the labors and perils of his Himalayan expedition, and who was to make a third in the little company of those who were, thenceforward, to hold fast to one another through good and evil days. Frankland had long been a friend of Tyndall's, Lubbock soon joined us; and it was we four who stood, pondering over many things, in Haslemere Churchyard the other day.

Tyndall became permanently attached to the Royal Institution in 1853, while I cast anchor in Jermyn Street, not far off, in the following year. Be

ish Association at Ipswich, as scientific fore reaching this settlement, we had "items," not, indeed, wholly unknown both done our best to expatriate ourto the " pillars" of that scientific con- selves by becoming candidates for the gregation; and perhaps already re-chairs of physics and of natural history garded as young men whose disposition in the University of Toronto, which

to keep their proper places could not, under all circumstances, be relied upon. Being young, with any amount of energy, no particular prospects, and no

happened to be simultaneously vacant. These, however, were provided with other occupants. The close relations into which we were thrown, on this

disposition to set about the ordinary and many subsequent occasions, had methods of acquiring them, we could the effect of associating us in the public conduct ourselves with perfect free-mind, as if we formed a sort of firm; dom; and we joined very cordially with results which were sometimes inin the proceedings of the Red Lion convenient and sometimes ludicrous. Club, of which I had become a mem- When my wife and I went to the ber in London, and which had been United States in 1876, for example, a

instituted by that most genial of antiPhilistines, Edward Forbes, as a protest against dons and donnishness in science. With this object, the Red Lions made a point of holding a feast of Spartan simplicity and anarchic constitution, with rites of a Pantagruelistic aspect, intermingled with extremely unconventional orations and queer songs, such as only Forbes could indite, by

New York paper was good enough to announce my coming, accompanied by my "titled bride" - which was rather hard upon plain folk, married twentyone years, and blessed with seven children to boot.1

My friend's exploits as a moun- good deal about what he was doing. It

taineer 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 frequently 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 cannot call to mind any serious manifestations of that sort in my friend. Tyndall "consumed his own smoke" better than most people,

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 speculation till that essential preliminary operation had been effected.

To Switzerland accordingly we went, and I joined him at the Montanvert, where he had taken up his quarters with Dr. Hirst, who was, I think, the closest of all his friends. I have never visited the place since, but I am told that it now possesses a grand hotel. In our time, there was nothing but a rough mountain auberge, opposite to which, on the glacier side of the road,

and though that faculty is worthy of was a hut for guides. Into this Tynthe highest admiration, I suspect that dall moved his bed, as he could not the exercise of it tells a good deal upon bear the noise of the wooden house. the furnace. When things got bad Accommodation and fare were of the with him, his one remedy was to rush roughest; our chef was a singularly off to the nearest hills and walk himself dirty old woman, who met all our suginto quietude. Pleasant are the recol-gestions about dinner with a monoto

lections, 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 highflying poetics, to boyish pranks and gymnastic comicalities.

Sometimes .we travelled further afield. Thus, in 1856, we made an expedition to Switzerland which had a large influence on Tyndall'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 occupied with his important investigations into the effects of pressure in giving rise to lamination, and I naturally heard a

nous "C'est ça" - as if the stores of a Parisian restaurant were at her disposal - while, practically, our repasts were as uniform as her speech. But as we used to start for the Jardin, or other of the higher regions early, and rarely returned much before sunset, there was no lack of hunger sauce ; while the condiment, which gives herbs a better flavor than stalled oxen, abounded. Tyndall's skill and audacity as a climber were often displayed in these excursions. On one occasion, I remember, we came upon a perpendicular cliff of ice of considerable height, formed on the flank of the glacier, which seemed to present a good opportunity for the examination of the structure of the interior. A hot sun loosening them, the stones on the surface of the glacier every now and then rattled down the face of the cliff. As no persuasion of ours could prevent Tyndall from ascending the cliff, by cutting steps with his axe, in order to get a close view of the ice, we had to the rock at the foot of the Grands Mu

Chamounix. If any accident had hap-own. But he was singularly scrupupened to my friends, I could not help lous-even punctilious-on points of them; nor could I reckon upon getting scientific honor. It would have been assistance from Chamounix, unless, intolerable to him to have it supposed perhaps, I set fire to the timbers which that he had used even suggestions of sheltered me. My anxiety and per- others, without acknowledgment; so plexity may be imagined, and at last, I, being thicker skinned, put up with as it grew colder, I went into the hut the possibility of being considered a