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THE DIAL
[Dec. 16,
Professor Tyndall occupied a large place in English scientific thought, and the vacancy caused by his death will not easily be filled. His original researches resulted in important contributions to knowledge, especially in the domain of molecular physics. Although they do not place him in the first rank of nineteenth century Englishmen of science, they secure for him a high position in the second. He belongs with Professor Huxley and Lord Kelvin, rather than with Darwin and Maxwell. He had the German training, and he combined the German thoroughness with the English instinct for sys- tematic and perspicuous presentation. Great as was his service in the character of an investi- gator, he did a still greater service to his coun- trymen in the character of an expositor. What Professor Huxley did for the new biology cre- ated by Darwin, was done by Professor Tyndall for the new physics created by Joule and Far- aday and Maxwell. It is customary in certain quarters to sneer at popular science ; and there is not a little popular science, so-called, which justifies the attitude of contempt. But no such reproach attaches to the work of men like Tyn- dall, whose knowledge of the subjects with which he dealt was both thorough and accurate. It is difficult to estimate the full value of the work done for the advancement of English public opinion in matters of science by the group of writers to which Tyndall belonged, and of which Professor Huxley is the most distin- guished remaining representative. They came at just the right time, and they brought just the right kind of powers to their task. Without the labors of these men, the great nineteenth century revolution in physical and biological science would indeed have been, none the later, & fait accompli ; but it would have taken much longer to reach the popular consciousness.
Professor Tyndall stood in the vanguard of the revolutionary forces, and bore the brunt of the battle. Twenty years ago, he incurred the odium, theologicum by an article in " The Con- temporory Keview," proposing that the efficacy of prayer should be subjected to a scientific test. He little thought, good easy man, what a hor- nets' nest this cold-blooded suggestion would bring about his ears. When, in the year fol- lowing this incident, he was presented at Oxford for the honorary doctorate, he found his can- didacy bitterly opposed by one of the professors of divinity in the University, on the ground that his teachings contravened " the whole tenor of that book, which with its open page inscribed Dominus ittnminatio meet the University still
bears as her device." Only a year later than this, his address before the Belfast meeting of the British Association, in which address he professed to discern in matter " the promise and potency of every form and quality of life," again aroused his theological opponents, and fanned afresh the flame of their zealous indignation. Only three or four years before these occur- rences, Professor Huxley, in a lecture upon Descartes, speaking of the religious persecution of which that philosopher was a victim, had said : " There are one or two living men, who, a couple of centuries hence, will be remembered as Descartes is now, because they have produced great thoughts which will live and grow as long as mankind lasts. If the twenty-first century studies their history, it will find that the Chris- tianity of the middle of the nineteenth century recognized them only as objects of vilification." The vilification to which Tyndall was subjected, in consequence of the acts above alluded to, came as a prompt and striking new illustration of Professor Huxley's remark.
Most earnest men, watching the world from day to day, get impatient because it moves so slowly. And yet, looking back over a few years, the same men will find cause for astonishment at the rapidity of its advance in this nineteenth century of ours. The Copernican doctrine re- quired from one to two centuries to make its way ; the Darwinian doctrine accomplished an equal revolution of thought in one or two de- cades. The suggestions that seemed so startling when made by Tyndall twenty years ago would to-day hardly cause a ripple of excitement any- where. Few intelligent people, whatever their religious beliefs, are now shocked at the admis- sion of spontaneous generation as a necessary link in the evolutionary chain, and few of them hold to a doctrine of prayer that invites such tests as that proposed by Tyndall in the early seventies. Of recent years, Tyndall has been assailed by the politicians almost as vehemently as he was once assailed by the theologians, and time will bring him a justification similar to that which it has brought him in the earlier con- troversy. In his denunciation of the recent Gladstonian attempt to dismember the United Kingdom he joined himself with such men as Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, and his mem- ory need fear no defeat in that alliance.
The noble intellectual temper of the man that has just died, the bent of mind which we venture to call essentially religious in spite of the religious antagonisms which it evoked, and the eloquence of expression that he knew how to im-
