John Tyndall was born in Leighlinbridge, County Carlow, Ireland in 1820. Twitter user @Sid_PEOG posted the following on October 24th:
Was in Leighlinbridge-birthplace of JohnTyndall Here is their tribute to him.Too little IMHO! #histsci #atheism http://yfrog.com/mz8bjhj
Here is the picture:
Click here for more on Tyndall and Leighlinbridge, and here for images of other plaques around the village
To add to my post about 19th-Century Caricature Prints with Tyndall, here are three more (all from Puck magazine) I have come across, two from the website Cartooning Evolution, 1861-1925, and the first one I saw on eBay (a reader of my Darwin blog emailed me a high quality scan of it but asked not to share it publicly):
Reason against Unreason, pitting luminous Men of Science (Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer, etc.) against Supernaturalism, Fanaticism, Bigotry, and the Bible
June 3, 1885, "Mr. Beecher is Trying to Bridge the Chasm between the Old Orthodoxy and Science with his Little Series of 'Evolution Sermons.'"
March 14, 1883, "An Appalling Attempt to Muzzle the Watch-Dog of Science: 'The Society for the Suppression of Blasphemous Literature proposes to get up cases against Huxley and Tyndall, Herbert Spencer and others who, by their writings have sown widespread unbelief and, in some cases rank athiesm.' -- Tel. London, March 5, 1883."
At two recent library book sales I have come across some Tyndall books. First, I found Hours of Exercise in the Alps (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896), a collection of writings about mountaineering. Second, as I scanned through the titles on the spines of old books at another sale, the word science caught my eye, then I saw fragments, then the name Tyndall. Thus, I now own a copy of the second volume of Tyndall’s Fragments of Science (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1905), which contains articles and lectures regarding religion, prayer, Darwin, evolution, his Belfast Address, and spontaneous generation.
Book sales are so much fun!
I had a chance to look at Thomas Glick’s new book, What about Darwin?: All Species of Opinion from Scientists, Sages, Friends, and Enemies Who Met, Read, and Discussed the Naturalist Who Changed the World
There is one entry for John Tyndall:
Here’s the text, which comes from Tyndall’s famous Belfast Address:
Mr. Darwin shirks no difficulty; and, saturated as the subject was with his own thought, he must have known better than his critics the weakness as well as the strength of his theory. This of course would be of little avail [43/44] were his object a temporary dialectic victory instead of the establishment of a truth which he means to be everlasting. But he takes no pains to disguise the weakness he has discerned; nay, he takes every pains to bring it into the strongest light. His vast resources enable him to cope with objections started by himself and others, so as to leave the final impression upon the reader’s mind that, if they be not completely answered, they certainly are not fatal. Their negative force being thus destroyed, you are free to be influenced by the vast positive mass of evidence he is able to bring before you. This largeness of knowledge and readiness of resource render Mr. Darwin the most terrible of antagonists. Accomplished naturalists have levelled heavy and sustained criticisms against him—not always with the view of fairly weighing his theory, but with the express intention of exposing its weak points only. This does not irritate him. He treats every objection with a soberness and thoroughness which even Bishop Butler might be proud to imitate, surrounding each fact with its appropriate detail, placing it in its proper relations, and usually giving it a significance which, as long as it was kept isolated, failed to appear. This is done without a trace of ill-temper. He moves over the subject with the passionless strength of a glacier; and the grinding of the rocks is not always without a counterpart in the logical pulverization of the objector.
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