make a portion of his volume. Forty years ago, Mr. Ruskin first saw the Alps from Schaffhausen.
"Only one great step," he says, "in the knowledge of glaciers has been made in all that period; and it seems the principal object of Prof. Tyndall's book to conceal its having been taken, that he and his friends may get the credit, some day, of having taken it themselves.... At the end of the last book of his he" (Prof. Tyndall) "denies, as far as he dares, the essential points of Forbes's discovery.... The readers of 'Fors' may imagine they have nothing to do with personal questions of this kind, but they have no conception of the degree in which general science is corrupted and retarded by those jealousies of the schools; nor how important it is to the cause of all true education that the criminal indulgence of them should be chastised. Criminal is a strong word, but an entirely just one. I am not likely to overrate the abilities of Prof. Tyndall; but he had at least intelligence enough to know that his dispute of the statements of Forbes by quibbling on the word viscous was as uncandid as it was unscholarly; and it retarded the advance of glacier science for at least ten years.... And the absurdity, as well as the iniquity, of the professor's willful avoidance of this gist of the whole debate is consummated in this last book, in which, though its title is the 'Forms of Water,' he actually never traces the transformation of snow into glacier-ice at all."
If these "terrible" words be true words, why was it left to an amateur to utter them? Why were they not uttered years ago by Prof. Tait himself? To these and other observations of Mr. Ruskin I offer no reply; nor should I have ever given them the slightest regard or attention were it not for the use which a scientific man has stooped to make of them.
"Fors Clavigera" has but a scanty circulation—how, then, were the "myriad intelligent readers" of Prof. Tait obtained? Simply by circulating "Fors" in Scotland, and republishing Mr. Ruskin's article in the Scotch newspapers. Prof. Tait, moreover, was for some years attached to Queen's College, Belfast, and I am to have the honor of presiding at the meeting of the British Association to be held next August in that city. Accordingly, the article in "Fors" has been republished in the Belfast journals also. The Northern Whig and the Belfast Newsletter have duly reached me with Mr. Ruskin's article conspicuously marked. These are some of the amenities of Prof. Tait: others are at hand, but I refuse to notice them. The spirit which prompts them may, after all, be but a local distortion of that noble force of heart which answered the "Cameron's gathering" at Waterloo; carried the Black Watch to Coomassie; and which has furnished Scotland with the materials of an immortal history. Still, rudeness is not independence, bluster is not strength, nor is coarseness courage. We have won the human understanding from the barbarism of the past; but we have won along with it the dignity, courtesy, and truth of civilized life. And the man who on the platform or in the press does violence to this ethical side of human nature discharges but an imperfect duty to the public, whatever the qualities of his understanding may be.—Contemporary Review.
