Life
1820-1893; b. 20 Aug., Leighlinbridge, Co. Carlow; Associate of Huxley;
his Belfast Address to the 1874 meeting of the British Association drove
the last nail into the coffin of the anti-evolutionists; works incl. Heat
Considered as a Mode of Motion, 1863; his explanation of the blue-ness
of the sky known as the ‘Tyndall effect’; also wrote Mountaineering,
and Hours of Exercise in the Alps, 1868; life of Faraday (Faraday
as a Discoverer, 1868), and succeeded him to importance Royal posts;
said to have originated ‘Home Rule is Rome Rule’ slogan; shocked
local Presbyterians by advocating materialism at Belfast conference of
Belfast Association, 1874; died accidentally of chloral poisoning [sleeping
medicine]. CAB JMC DIB DIW OCEL
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Works
[Selected], Glaciers of the Alps (1860); Heat Considered as
a Mode of Motion (1863); On Sound (1867); Faraday as a Discoverer (1868); Fragments of Science for Unscientific People (1871);
Hours of Exercise in the Alps (11871); Forms of Water in Clouds,
Ice, [ &c.] (1872); Six Lectures on Light (1873);
Address delivered before the British Association Assembled in Belfast (1874); Lessons in Electricity at the Royal Institute (1876).
Reprint, W. H. Brock, N. D. McMillan & R. C. Mullan, eds., John Tyndall, Essays on a Natural Philosopher (Dublin: RIA 1981).
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Criticism
Roy Johnston, ‘Godless Colleges and Non-Persons’, Causeway
1 (Autumn 1993), pp.36-38; See sketch of Tyndall in Frank Harris Contemporary
Portraits (Edns. from 1915), and John Wilson Foster, Recoveries:
Neglected Episodes in Irish Cultural History, 1860-1912 (Dublin:
UCD Press 2002). See also comments on his materialism in
Jonathan Parry, Democracy and Religion: Glaadstone and the Liberal Party, 1867-75 (Cambridge UP);
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References
Bernard Share, ed., Far Green Fields: 1500 Years
of Irish Travel Writing (Blackstaff 1992); extract from The Glaciers
of the Alps, new ed. (London: Longmans Green 1896; first publ. 1860),
gives extract.
Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington: University of America 1904); selects addresses, incl ‘Scientific Limit of Imagination’; also extract from Hours of Exercise on the Alps.
Margaret Drabble, ed., Oxford Companion of English Literature (OUP: 1985):‘his famous address in Belfast on the relation of science and theology gave rise to acute controversy’. See also reference under Henry O’Brien.
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Notes
Gerard Manley Hopkins read Tyndall’s popularisation
of Helmholtz’s work on optics and acoustics, using Tyndall’s
speculations about light-waves, ‘scattered particles’, the azure
of the sky, and the ‘pure unsifted solar light’, in his poem
‘The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air we Breathe’ [‘Yet
such a sapphire-shot,/Charged, steeped sky will not/Stain light. Yea,
mark you this:/it does no prejudice./The glass-blue days are those/When
every colour glows,/Each shape and shadow shows./Blue be it: this blue
heaven/The seven or seven times seven/Hued sunbeam will transmit/Perfect,
not alter it. (See Jenny Uglow, review of Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science
in Cultural Encounter [1995], in TLS, 13 Dec. p.6; and note that
Uglow goes on to remark that Tyndall attributed his extraordinary understanding
of relations in space to his childhood love of what he called ‘the
involved and inverted sentences’ of Paradise Lost.’)
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