Born, at Leiglinbridge, near Carlow, Ireland, 21 Aug. 1820. Early education at village school. On Irish Ordnance Survey, 1839–44. Held post as engineer, 1844–47. Assistant Master at Queenwood Coll., Hamps., 1847. Studied in Germany, 1848–51. F.R.S., 1853. Prof. of Nat. Philos., Royal Institution, 1853; Resident Director, 1867–87. Examiner to Council of Military Education, 1855. First visit to Switzerland, with Prof. Huxley, to study glaciers, 1856. Rumford Medal, Royal Society, 1864. Hon. LL.D., Camb., 1865. Hon. LL.D., Edinburgh, 1866. Lectured in U.S.A., 1872. Hon. D.C.L., Oxford, 18 June 1873. Pres. British Association, 1874. Married Hon. Louisa Hamilton, 29 Feb. 1876. Pres. of Birmingham and Midland Institute, 1877. For some years Scientific Adviser to Board of Trade; resigned, 1883. F.G.S. Died, at Haslemere, 4 Dec. 1893. Works: “The Glaciers of the Alps,” 1860; “Mountaineering in 1861,” 1862; “Heat considered as a Mode of Motion,” 1863; “On Radiation,” 1865; “Sound,” 1867; “Faraday as a Discoverer,” 1868; “Natural Philosophy in Easy Lessons” [1869]; “Notes of a Course of Nine Lectures on Light,” 1869; “Researches on Diamagnetism,” 1870; “Notes of a Course of Seven Lectures on Electrical Phenomena,” 1870; “On the Scientific use of the Imagination,” 1870; “Hours of Exercise in the Alps,” 1871; “Fragments of Science for Unscientific People” (2 vols.), 1871; “Contributions to Molecular Physics,” 1872; “The Forms of Water,” 1873; “Principal Forbes and his Biographers,” 1873; “Six Lectures on Light,” 1873; “Address delivered before the British Association,” 1874; “On the Transmission of Sound by the Atmosphere,” 1874; “Lessons in Electricity,” 1876; “Fermentation,” 1877; “The Sabbath,” 1880; “Essays on the Floating Matter of the Air,” 1881; “Free Molecules and Radiant Heat,” 1882; “Perverted Politics” (from “St. James’s Gaz.”), 1887; “Mr. Gladstone and Home Rule,” 1887; “New Fragments,” 1892 [1891].

Personal

  I should have liked to have seen your handwriting this morning, though none the less obliged to Mr. Tyndall, who makes the best of your having had a bad night. What a dear, warm-hearted darling he is! I should like to kiss him!

  The other thing was a lecture of Tyndall’s at the Royal Institution. It was said not to be one of his best; but his experiments were curious, and neat, and uniformly successful. But all the time I could not help a kind of sense of the insolence of the man, such as he appeared to be, claiming to bring all truth within what he called science. There was hardheadedness, originality, and sometimes a touch of imagination. But there seemed to be also a hard and hopeless one-sidedness, as if nothing in the world would open his eyes to the whole domain of soul and spirit close about him, and without which he would not be talking or devising wonderful experiments.

  From climbing we drifted off to books and literature, especially in America. I found my companion singularly well informed in our literature, and especially enthusiastic about Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom he pronounced with some energy by far the greatest mind in our literary annals. Such an admiration, coming from a professor of physical science, sounded a little surprising. It has been amply explained, however, by later utterances of Tyndall, which have made plain to us that along with his study of material forces, he has always maintained a lively and sympathetic interest in the subtler refinements of imaginative or metaphysical thought, and that side by side with his scientific formulæ has always lain, half hidden, a spring of fresh poetic feeling and appreciation which has, in an unevident way, permeated and adorned all his severer labors.

  Tyndall is here: last night he sat out with a lot of us, as we took our post-prandial coffee and what not. He talked well, and seemed to enjoy it. I like what I have seen of him. He is quite unaffected, so much so as not to mind flinging out, every now and then, dashes of real Hibernian rhetoric.

  Tyndall had a harsh voice, but he made it do its work. He spoke clearly. His sentences had a beginning, a middle, and an end. He was a born rhetorician and—what is perhaps more—a trained rhetorician. Of course he was not English; he was Irish, or at most Anglo-Irish; his ancestors having migrated two centuries ago from Gloucestershire to Ireland. But he and his forbears had during these two hundred years breathed the air of Ireland, and had become in many respects altogether Irish. You would never be in doubt when you heard Tyndall speak among what people his youth had been spent and his accent acquired.

  Professor Tyndall was one of the earliest, if not the earliest, of the great Alpine climbers. What will the Aletsch glacier hereafter be to those of us who have enjoyed the homely hospitality of Alp Lusgen—what will it be without Professor Tyndall? He was the most conspicuous man of science of his time; but it is as a mountaineer that he will be most widely and affectionately remembered. A week on the Bel Alp, with Tyndall as guide, philosopher, and friend, was an era in a life. He was familiar with all the secrets of the wonder-world that lies above the snow-line, and he had a rare power, which he freely and graciously exercised, of imparting them to others. Those summer nights, when, from the terrace in front of his chalet, we heard the thundercloud break over Italy, and saw the lightning play round Monte Rosa, are not to be forgotten. It pleases me to think that he was able the autumn of his death to revisit altitudes which he loved so well,—to pass, indeed, almost without a pause, from the august company of the “silent summits” to “the infinite azure” beyond.

  Though it is scarcely needful to say anything about his sincerity, yet it cannot properly be passed over, since it was a leading trait in his nature. It has been conspicuous to all, alike in his acts and in his words…. In him there was no spirit of compromise. It never occurred to him to ask what it was politic to say, but simply to ask what was true. The like has of late years been shown in his utterances concerning political matters—shown, it may be, with too great an outspokenness. This outspokenness was displayed, also, in private, and sometimes perhaps too much displayed, but everyone must have the defects of his qualities, and where absolute sincerity exists, it is certain now and then to cause an expression of a feeling or opinion not adequately restrained. But the contrast in genuineness between him and the average citizen was very conspicuous…. In addition to generosity under its ordinary form, which Professor Tyndall displayed in unusual degree, he displayed it under a less common form. He was ready to take much trouble to help friends. I have had personal experience of this. Though he had always in hand some investigation of great interest to him, and though, as I have heard him say, when he had bent his mind to a subject he could not with any facility break off and resume it again, yet, when I have sought his scientific aid—information or critical opinion—I never found the slightest reluctance to give me his undivided attention. Much more markedly, however, was this kind of generosity shown in another direction. Many men, while they are eager for appreciation, manifest little or no appreciation of others, and still less go out of their way to express it. With Tyndall it was not thus: he was eager to recognise achievement.

  Before one knew him well, it seemed possible to give an exhaustive definition of him in a string of epigrammatic antitheses, such as those in which the older historians delight to sum up the character of a king or leading statesman. Impulsive vehemence was associated with a singular power of self-control and a deep-seated reserve, not easily penetrated. Free-handed generosity lay side by side with much tenacity of insistence on any right, small or great; intense self-respect and a somewhat stern independence, with a sympathetic geniality of manner, especially towards children, with whom Tyndall was always a great favorite. Flights of imaginative rhetoric which amused (and sometimes amazed) more phlegmatic people, proceeded from a singularly clear and hard-headed reasoner over-scrupulous, if that may be, about keeping within the strictest limits of logical demonstration; and sincere to the core. A bright and even playful companion, Tyndall had little of that quick appreciation of the humorous side of things in general, and of one’s self in particular, which is as oil to the waves of life, and is a chief component of the worthier kind of tact; indeed, the best reward of the utterer of a small witticism, or play upon words, in his presence, was the blank, if benevolent, perplexity with which he received it.

  As a matter of fact John Tyndall himself was a thorough-going Celt in physique and in temperament. He had the iron constitution, the wiry strength, and the reckless love of danger and adventure, the fervid imagination, the fiery zeal, the abundant eloquence, the somewhat flowery rhetoric, the tenderness of heart, the munificent generosity, which distinguish the character of his Celtic countrymen. Even the obstinate determination with which in later life he opposed, tooth and nail, the claim of his nation to national self-government was itself thoroughly Irish.

  Tyndall was a personality of exceeding interest. He exercised an often magical charm upon those with whom he was closely associated, but when his opposition was aroused he showed himself a keen controversalist.

General

  Tyndall is a man of great ability and earnestness. He has done, perhaps, more practical work in science than Huxley has; he has written more; he sometimes writes more eloquently. But he wants, to my thinking, that pure and colorless impartiality of inquiry and judgment which is Huxley’s distinguishing characteristic. There is a certain coarseness of materialism about Tyndall; there is a vehement and almost an arrogant aggressiveness in him which must interfere with the clearness of his views. He assails the orthodox with the temper of a Hot Gospeller. Perhaps his Irish nature is partly accountable for this warm and eager combativeness: perhaps his having sat so devotedly at the feet of his friend, the great apostle of force, Thomas Carlyle, may help to explain the unsparing vigor of his controversial style. However that may be, Tyndall is assuredly one of the most impatient of sages, one of the most intolerant of philosophers.

  Because Tyndall is great in experimental science, many are apt to accept his cosmological conclusions. Because he is a great observer in natural history, his metaphysical theories are supposed to be supported by observation, and to rest on experience. Professor Tyndall’s own address terminates, not in science, but nescience. It treats of a realm of atoms and molecules whose existence science has never demonstrated, and attributes to them potencies which science has never verified. It is a system, not made necessary by the stringent constraint of facts, but avowedly constructed in order to avoid the belief in an intelligent Creator, and a universe marked by the presence of design. His theory, he admits, no less than that of Darwin, was not constructed in the pure interests of truth for its own sake. There was another purpose in both—to get rid of a theology of final causes, of a theology which conceives of God as a human artificer. He wished to exclude religion from the field of cosmogony, and forbid it to intrude on the region of knowledge…. Professor Tyndall accepts religious faith as an important element of human nature, but considers it as confined to the sentiments, and as not based in knowledge.

  As a metaphysician he is a fatalistic evolutionist with a dash of imaginative optimism. As a theologian he is a sentimental atheist or an imaginative agnostic. In each of these several capacities he dexterously shifts from one phase to the other of his sensitive many-sidedness of opinion and phraseology, according to the varying needs and aspects of his argument and his audience…. As we have read the occasional addresses of Professor Tyndall with unabated interest, and noticed that they have usually represented the results of the meditations of his summer holidays, we have learned to conceive of them as the romantic essays of an imagination surcharged with the ferment of philosophical speculations, and kindled to a midsummer excitement by the glow of his inward fervor.

  What we and the public have to do with are not Dr. Tyndall’s moods of mind, nor his personal creed, but his treatment of grave questions in the name of science. This treatment has appeared, in our judgment, open to grave comment. It has meddled with much that lay outside his province, and upon which science, following its only true methods, can never be able to pronounce,—suggesting what it has not proved, and leading, without excuse, the thoughts of his hearers toward absurd negations or equally absurd imaginations,—hanging out, in short, old rags of Democratism as if they were new flags of scientific triumph.

  The position of Professor Tyndall in the world of science is somewhat unique. He is one of our most popular teachers of physical science; he is one of our most successful experimentalists; and he is one of our most attractive writers. By his discoveries he has largely extended our knowledge of the laws of Nature; by his teachings and writings he has probably done more than any other man in England to kindle a love of science among the masses; and by his life he has set an example to students of science which cannot be too widely known or appreciated. There are men who have made greater and more useful discoveries in science, but few have made more interesting discoveries. There are men whose achievements have been more highly esteemed by the devotees of pure science, but rarely has a scientific man been more popular outside the scientific world. There are men whose culture has been broader and deeper, but who have nevertheless lacked his facility of exposition and gracefulness of diction. The goddess of Science, which ofttimes was presented to the public with the repulsive severity of a skeleton, he has clothed with flesh and blood, making her countenance appear radiant with the glow of poesy, and susceptible even to a touch of human sympathy.

  He was a first-rate man of science. He stood next after Huxley, who stood next after Darwin, in the Darwinian trilogy.

  Among those of Tyndall’s books which have a place in literature as well as in science, “Heat considered as a Mode of Motion” is doubtless the most eminent. At the time when it was published, in 1863, the doctrines of the correlation of forces and the conservation of energy were still among the novelties, and the researches of Joule, Helmholtz, and Mayer, which had done so much to establish them, were not generally understood. Tyndall’s book came in the nick of time; it was a masterpiece of scientific exposition such as had not been seen for many a day; and it did more than any other book to make men familiar with those all-pervading physical truths that lie at the bottom of evolution. This book, moreover, showed Tyndall not only as a master in physical investigation, but as an eminent literary artist and one of the best writers of English prose that our age has seen.

  As a writer he had a singularly charming style; and it is not unlikely that his gift of grace and clearness has really been an injury to his scientific reputation. In this and other respects his fortune has not been unlike that of his friend Prof. Huxley. Their talent for happy exposition has caused them to be looked upon by many rather as great expounders than as great investigators and discoverers in science. But those who are familiar with their writings are aware that this view is a mistaken one, and that while none of their contemporaries have surpassed them in industrious experiment and research, few have equalled them in the value of their contributions to scientific progress. To attempt even to enumerate the most striking results of Tyndall’s studies relating to magnetism and electricity, to radiant heat, to light and sound, to the properties of water and air, to glacial formations, and indeed to almost every branch of physics, would extend this sketch beyond its reasonable limits…. As a controversialist, his powers of argument, his learning and his courtesy to opponents were well displayed in the long discussion evoked by his noted Belfast address. An often-quoted expression in his address brought against him the imputation of materialism—an imputation which, in the sense implied by his assailants, was undeserved.

  With the death of Professor Tyndall has passed away the second of the men whose names are associated as the three English men of science of the Victorian era. His claim to be included in this trio does not rest on his being the deepest thinker, the most accurate and ingenious experimentalist, or the most original investigator in the branch of science upon which he was engaged. If it did so, he might have to yield his place to another, for Lord Kelvin is probably as much his superior as a physicist, as Browning is thought by many to have surpassed Tennyson as a poet. Nevertheless, in both cases, the lesser man may be the more typical of and more influential on the age in which he lived. Though Tyndall’s work must be ranked far below that of Darwin, he was far more the representative man of the two, owing to his brilliant versatility, restless energy, his combination of the culture of the literary student with the insight of the scientist and the power of the man of action, his breadth of sympathy and the apostolic zeal with which he fought for a sounder and more scientific system of education.

  I need not dwell on the more conspicuous of Professor 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 emphasised by others. Here I will remark only on certain powers of thought, not quite so obvious, which have 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 exemplifies it…. Professor Tyndall’s thoughts were not limited to physics and allied sciences, but passed into psychology; and though this was not one of his topics, it was a subject of interest to him. Led as he was to make excursions into the science of mind, he was led also into that indeterminate region through which this science passes into the science of being; if we can call that a science of which the issue is nescience. He was much more conscious than physicists usually are, that every physical inquiry, pursued to the end, brings us down to metaphysics, and leaves us face to face with an insoluble problem.

  He has written in a style informed with much literary grace, on heat, sound, and kindred subjects, and has done more, perhaps, than any other writer to popularize science throughout the English-speaking world.

  It was at the Royal Institution that Tyndall became really a power in the land. Endowed with a marvelous gift of clear presentation, and with a rare faculty for holding the interest of an audience, he was soon recognised above all things as the popular exponent of physical science. When one comes to ask, “What one great work did Tyndall perform in life?” it would be difficult for any man to give a definite answer. He advanced many branches of science in certain directions; but, for the most part, those directions had been amply indicated beforehand by others. His observations on glaciers took up the varied threads of Agassiz, Forbes and Faraday: his researches on heat were in the direct line of Count Rumford and Joule and Melloni. It is the same throughout. We cannot say of him that he gave us any one great conception, like natural selection or the conservation of energy; any one great discovery, like spectrum analysis or the meteoric nature of comets; any one great invention, like the telephone or the phonograph. But his personality and his influence were pervasive and important; his powers of exposition were in every way remarkable; and his investigations, though never quite reaching the first rank in value, stood very high, indeed, in the forefront of the second…. No man had ever a profounder conception of the ultimate atom, its nature and its powers, its sympathies and antipathies, its forces and its energies. Few men have looked deeper behind the world of sense and illusion into the impalpable verities which constitute the universe.

  Between a great man recognised by his generation, and a man made great by his reputation, there is need of careful discrimination. I fancy that Darwin and Tyndall may serve as contrasting types…. Tyndall’s actual scientific work has left little impression upon science. He has founded no school; he has stimulated no large bulk of original research. Yet his actual publications were voluminous: besides the well-known volumes that have delighted so many readers—as for instance, the volumes on “Heat as a Mode of Motion,” or the “Researches on Diamagnetism and Magnecrystallic Action,” or the later volumes dealing with germs. He contributed largely to technical memoirs. Thus in the “Royal Society Catalogue of Scientific Papers” up to 1863, there are 72 articles under his name; in the later catalogue, complete up to 1873, there are 40 more, and after that date there are at least 30 more as yet uncatalogued. A close inspection of these shows that his original researches were confined chiefly to three subjects: Diamagnetism, Heat, the Action of Ice, and the Influence of Dust Particles in the Air and in other Gases. But in all these he was completing the work and developing the ideas of other men—notably Faraday, Knoblauch, and Pasteur…. He had all the instincts of the intelligent amateur joined with an intellectual vigour and a herculean capacity for work. Keen, alert, and discriminating in his survey of contemporary work in all branches of science, he was ready at any moment to anticipate the importance of discoveries, and by his own work to help largely in their development. No doubt his position as a lecturer at the Royal Institution accentuated this bent of his talent: his business was to cater for the public, and to bring to their notice the newest scientific goods from France and Germany. A scientific eclecticism was unavoidable, and he fulfilled the duties of his post to admiration. But his greatness did not depend on his original research, and Physics and Biology were little advanced by his work.

  It was his power as a scientific expositor that gave Prof. Tyndall his worldwide reputation, and it is on this that his fame chiefly rests. His ability to present even abstruse subjects to a popular audience was unexcelled. The vividness of his imagination, which enabled him to form clear mental pictures of the phenomena he sought to explain, and his aptness in illustration led him to translate abstract ideas in their concrete equivalents…. It was these rare gifts as an interpreter of science which first drew the attention of American readers to Prof. Tyndall, and which finally led to his visit to this country in 1872. Many now living will recall that event and the impulse given to American science by the brilliant course of lectures which he delivered in our chief Atlantic cities.

  It is an easy thing to remand Professor Tyndall, without more ado, to the camp of materialists, and thereby attach to his name the opprobrium which falls upon all those who hold that grosser form of materialism which Carlyle characterizes as the “philosophy of mud.” There are materialists and materialists. Professor Tyndall must be carefully distinguished from the spirit-blind devotees of matter, who stoutly insist that the manifold problems of being and destiny find a ready solution in the properties of matter and the law of the conservation of energy. He differs radically at this point, from the rank and file of pure materialists. To overlook the difference between them prevents an honest and just estimate of the man, as a scientist and a philosopher…. At the outermost rim of his scientific investigation, Professor Tyndall acknowledges ever a bourne of mystery beyond. Towards this he looks with interest and with reverence. There is no indifference in his attitude towards the great unknown—and no conceit. You may call the position in reference to the world of the unseen, and its mysteries, as that of an agnostic; but here also his agnosticism must be distinguished from many who thus style their philosophy or rather lack of philosophy. With him, knowledge is either observed fact, or induced law through verified experiments. All else he has been accustomed to regard as lying beyond his ken…. In his “Hours of Exercise in the Alps,” his love of nature, again and again, breaks into apostrophe. His admiration is akin to reverence. His communion with nature is not that of a materialist; it is that of the humble child of nature.

  He had the German training, and he combined the German thoroughness with the English instinct for systematic and perspicuous presentation. Great as was his service in the character of an investigator, he did a still greater service to his countrymen in the character of an expositor. What Professor Huxley did for the new biology created by Darwin, was done by Professor Tyndall for the new physics created by Joule and Faraday and Maxwell.

  The value of his contributions to science, especially on such subjects as light, heat, and sound, secured for him a European reputation, which he brilliantly sustained. To the gift of clear exposition, Professor Tyndall united eloquence, imagination, and a feeling for poetry. When the matter was one of purely scientific exposition, these qualities were wont to lend a peculiar charm to his deliverances.

  Conciliated critical opinion by the courage with which he insisted on the value of the imagination in the pursuit of scientific inquiry. He had remarkable rhetorical gifts, and in his early publications on mountain structure he cultivated a highly coloured style, influenced by Ruskin, and even by Tennyson. Perhaps the best-written of his philosophical treatises is the “Forms of Water” (1872), where his tendency to polychromatic rodomontade is kept in some check.

  The man who has done the most to popularise natural science in England is John Tyndall…. On January 21st, 1870, Tyndall delivered a lecture, at the Royal Institution, on “Dust and Disease,” and gave the results of some investigations of his own on floating organic matter in the air. Examination of air before and after being subjected to a very high temperature showed that a large proportion of the dust it contained was organic matter, since it disappeared on being burnt. In the course of the lecture Tyndall propounded a germ theory of diseases, saying that as surely as a pig comes from a pig, or a grape from a grape, so surely does the typhoid virus, or seed, when scattered about among people, give rise to typhoid fever, scarlatina virus to scarlatina, and small-pox virus to small-pox; and that the virus was carried about by the floating organic matter in the air. Many eminent men were present at the lecture, and those of the medical profession received his views with disfavour, going so far as to ridicule the germ theory. The accuracy of the germ theory has since, however, been proved over and over again. The discovery of the way in which diseases are spread has been of incalculable benefit to mankind, by showing that if the sanitary arrangements of a district are perfect, and all diseased organic matter carried away without access to the atmosphere, the risk of infection is reduced to a minimum. It was as a popular lecturer that Tyndall excelled. The reason of his success in lecturing to the “unscientific” may be found in his aptitude for imparting his knowledge in the simplest language, and in exciting the interest of an audience by homely illustrations. He has probably done more than any other man of science to raise the standard of education amongst the uneducated classes.