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ABSTRACT
One of the most influential imagined histories of science of the nineteenth century was John Tyndall's Belfast Address of 1874. In that address, Tyndall presented a sweeping history of science that focused on the attempt to understand the material nature of life. While the address has garnered attention for its discussion of the conflict at the centre of this history, namely between science and theology, less has been said about how Tyndall's history culminated with a discussion of the evolutionary researches of Charles Darwin. Tyndall presented Darwin as a revolutionary scientific practitioner, whose virtues of patience, self-denial, and observation led him to his epochal theory of evolution and thus justified the extension of science into realms previously under the purview of theology. Tyndall was criticized at the time for his ‘vulgar admiration’ of a man of science who was still very much alive, and who could not possibly live up to such ‘fulsome adulation’. What such critics failed to realize, however, is that Tyndall had historicized the living Darwin within the context of his own philosophy of history that he cultivated years before, a philosophy that integrated the moral lives of heroic individuals within a progressive history of science itself.
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Notes
1 P. Chalmers Mitchell, “Professor Tyndall,” The New Review 10:56 (January 1894): 77–85, on 80.
2 [John Tulloch], “Modern Scientific Materialism,” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 116:709 (November 1874): 519–539, on 528 “vulgar admiration”; and “Professor Tyndall's Address,” The Saturday Review, 22 August 1874, 236–238, on 237 “fulsome adulation.”
3 Ruth Barton, The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 184–185.
4 Roland Jackson, The Ascent of John Tyndall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 150.
5 Tyndall's engagement with evolution has been typically written about in the context of the spontaneous generation debates. See, for instance, James Strick, “Darwinism and the Origin of Life: The Role of H. C. Bastian in the British Spontaneous Generation Debates, 1868–1873,” Journal of the History of Biology 32 (1999): 51–92.
6 Bernard Lightman, “Fashioning the Victorian Man of Science: Tyndall's Shifting Strategies,” Journal of Dialectics of Nature 38 (2015): 25–38.
7 For Tyndall's cosmic vision of nature see Elizabeth Neswald, “Saving the World in the Age of Entropy: John Tyndall and the Second Law of Thermodynamics,” in The Age of Scientific Naturalism: Tyndall and His Contemporaries, ed. Bernard Lightman and Michael S. Reidy (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), 15–31, 209–212; and John Tyndall, “The Cosmology of the Universe,” Fortnightly Review 14 (1865): 129–144.
8 On Tyndall's early development see Roland Jackson, The Ascent of John Tyndall, 1–61; Barton, The X Club, 58–75; and Ian Hesketh, “Technologies of the Scientific Self: John Tyndall and His Journal,” Isis 110:3 (December 2019): 460–482. For the changing role of scientific biographies in nineteenth-century Britain see Rebekah Higgitt, Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of a Nineteenth-Century History of Science (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007).
9 The notion that scientific practitioners often embed their work within an ‘imagined history of science’ was recently put forward in Adrian Wilson, “Science's Imagined Pasts,” Isis 108:4 (2017): 814–826.
10 Tyndall to Sabine, 5 July 1852, in The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Vol. 3: January 1850–December 1852, ed. Ruth Barton, Jeremiah Rankine, and Michael S. Reidy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), 461.
11 See, for instance, Anne Secord, “‘Be What You Would Seem to Be’: Samuel Smiles, Thomas Edward, and the Making of a Working-Class Scientific Hero,” Science in Context 16 (2003): 147–173. Tyndall refers to his devotion to ‘a certain idea of self culture’ in Tyndall to Sabine, 5 July 1852, in The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Vol. 3, 461.
12 See especially Ursula DeYoung, A Vision of Modern Science: John Tyndall and the Role of the Scientist in Victorian Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 60–69. See also Frank Turner, “Victorian Scientific Naturalism and Thomas Carlyle,” Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 131–150; and Hesketh, “Technologies of the Scientific Self,” 466–469.
13 John Tyndall, “Personal Recollections of Thomas Carlyle,” Fortnightly Review 47:277 (1890):5–32, on 6. See also references to Past and Present in his journal: Tyndall, Journal, 23, 24, and 25 June 1844, Papers of John Tyndall, Royal Institution of Great Britain, London, UK (hereafter cited as Tyndall Papers), RI MS JT/2/13a/43; 27 June 1844, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/43–44; 29 June 1844, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/44; 2 July 1844, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/45; 12 July 1844, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/47; and 15 July 1844, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/47.
14 Tyndall, Journal, 6 August 1847, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/241–243.
15 Tyndall, “Personal Recollections of Thomas Carlyle,” 28.
16 See, for instance, Tyndall, Journal, 15 April 1844, Tyndall Papers, JT/2/13a/28.
17 [George L. Craik], The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties; Illustrated by Anecdotes, 2 vols. (London: Charles Knight, 1830–31), Vol. 1, 1. While the book was published anonymously when Tyndall read it, a later edition attributed the authorship to the writer, George Craik. On the function of anonymous publishing in the nineteenth century see James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Ian Hesketh, Victorian Jesus: J. R. Seeley, Religion, and the Cultural Significance of Anonymity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017).
18 [Craik], The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties, Vol. 1, 419.
19 [Craik], The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties, Vol. 1, 7.
20 For some examples as to how this image of Newton influenced Tyndall's later scientific practices see Hesketh, “Technologies of the Scientific Self,” 466, 471–472.
21 [Craik], The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties, Vol. 2, 307.
22 [Craik], The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties, Vol. 2, 319.
23 [Craik], The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties, Vol. 2, 320.
24 D. Thompson, “Queenwood College, Hampshire,” Annals of Science 11:3 (1955): 246–254.
25 Thompson, “Queenwood College, Hampshire,” 250.
26 Tyndall, Journal, 25 November 1847, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/270; and 2 Dec 1847, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/278.
27 Tyndall, Journal, 22 February 1848, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/298.
28 Tyndall, Journal, 22 February 1848, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/298–299.
29 Roland Jackson, “John Tyndall and the Early History of Diamagnetism,” Annals of Science 72 (2015): 435–489.
30 Barton, The X Club, 119.
31 Michael Faraday to Tyndall, 19 April 1851, in The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Vol. 3, 205.
32 Tyndall, Journal, 28 April [1851], Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/6/539.
33 Tyndall, Journal, 12 June 1857, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13c/940.
34 Tyndall, Journal, 28 October 1853, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/6/630.
35 For a full analysis of this episode see Roland Jackson, “John Tyndall and the Royal Medal That Was Never Struck,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 68 (2014): 151–164.
36 Tyndall, Journal, 8 Nov 1853, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/6/633.
37 Tyndall to Thomas Hirst, [12 February 1854], in The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Vol. 4: January 1853–December 1854, ed. Ian Hesketh and Efram Sera-Shriar (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 281.
38 For an analysis of Tyndall's book on Faraday see Geoffrey Cantor, “The Scientist as Hero: Public Images of Michael Faraday,” in Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography, ed. Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 171–194, on 173–177.
39 John Tyndall, Faraday as a Discoverer (London: Longmans, Green, 1868), 2.
40 Tyndall, Faraday as a Discoverer, 20.
41 Tyndall, Faraday as a Discoverer, 37. This was a view of Faraday that Tyndall grasped early on. This is from an entry from his journal in 1853: ‘Surely this man has strength, but it is coupled with a childlike kindness, let me learn a lesson here. I love strength but let me not forget the possibility of uniting it with softness demonstrated by the character of Faraday’. Tyndall, Journal, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/6/632.
42 “Faraday as a Discoverer,” The Athenaeum, 21 March 1868, 414–415.
43 “Faraday as a Discoverer,” The Popular Science Review 7:26 (January 1868): 183–184, on 183.
44 “Faraday as a Discoverer,” The Popular Science Review, 184.
45 J. Scott Russell, “Faraday, A Discoverer,” Macmillan's Magazine 18 (May 1868): 184–191, on 184.
46 “Faraday as a Discoverer,” The Saturday Review, 9 May 1868, 619–621, on 620.
47 Indeed, in some ways, as Barton points out, ‘we learn more about X Club goals and ambitions from their relative failures than from their successes’. Barton, The X Club, 313.
48 Barton, The X Club, 16, 277, quote on 16.
49 [Thomas Henry Huxley], “Darwin on the Origin of Species,” Westminster Review 17:2 (April 1860): 541–570, on 570.
50 Tyndall to Thomas Henry Huxley, [April 1860], in The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Vol. 7: March 1859–May 1862, ed. Diarmid Finnegan, Roland Jackson, Nanna Katrine Luders Kaalund (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 158.
51 James Secord, Victorian Sensation. On the connection between evolution and working-class radicalism see Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
52 Tyndall, Journal, 7 July 1847, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/228.
53 Tyndall, Journal, 20–22 July 1847, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/231–237.
54 Tyndall, Journal, 17 December 1847, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/280.
55 James Craven to Tyndall, 16 October 1849, in The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Vol. 2: September 1843–December 1849, ed. Melinda Baldwin and Janet Browne (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 340.
56 Tyndall, Journal, 17 December 1847, Tyndall Papers, JT/2/13a/280–281; cf. [Robert Chambers], Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London: John Churchill, 1844), 300–301.
57 Tyndall, Journal, 20 December 1847, Tyndall Papers, JT/2/13a/285; cf. [Chambers], Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 303: ‘Man's mind becomes subdued, like the dyer's hand, to that it works in. In rude and difficult circumstances we unavoidably become rude, because then only the inferior and harsher faculties of our nature are called into question’.
58 [Thomas Henry Huxley], “The Vestiges of Creation,” The British Foreign and Medico-Chirurgical Review 13:26 (April 1854): 425–439, on 438, 439.
59 Thomas Hirst, Diary, 5 January 1848, in Natural Knowledge in Social Context: The Journals of Thomas Archer Hirst FRS, ed. William H. Brock and Roy M. MacLeod (London: Mansell, 1980), f. 174; and Secord, Victorian Sensation, 338.
60 Tyndall, Journal, 21 June 1855, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13c/761–762.
61 John Tyndall, Glaciers of the Alps (London: John Murray, 1860). On the reception of the book see Sarah Dry, Waters of the World (London: Scribe, 2019), Ch. 2. See also Bruce Hevly, “The Heroic Science of Glacier Motion,” Osiris 11 (1996): 66–86; and Michael S. Reidy, “Mountaineering, Masculinity, and the Male Body in Mid-Victorian Britain,” Osiris 30 (2015): 158–181.
62 See Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund, “A Frosty Disagreement: John Tyndall, James David Forbes, and the Early Formation of the X-Club,” Annals of Science 74:4 (2017): 282–298.
63 W. Hopkins to Tyndall, 19 May 1860, The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Vol. 7, 164; Hopkins, “Physical Theories of the Phenomena of Life, Part II,” Fraser's Magazine 62:367 (July 1860): 74–90; and [Hopkins], “The Glaciers of the Alps,” Fraser's Magazine 62:372 (December 1860): 793–809.
64 Ian Hesketh, Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
65 See, for instance, Darwin to Huxley, 5 July 1860, Darwin Correspondence Project, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-2861 (accessed 11 January 2019); and Darwin to Huxley, 20 July 1860, Darwin Correspondence Project, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2873.xml (accessed 11 January 2019).
66 William Hopkins, “Physical Theories of the Phenomena of Life, Part I,” Fraser's Magazine 61:366 (June 1860): 739–752, on 751.
67 William Hopkins, “Physical Theories of the Phenomena of Life, Part II,” Fraser's Magazine 62:367 (July 1860): 74–90, on 86.
68 Richard Bellon, “Inspiration in the Harness of Daily Labor: Darwin, Botany, and the Triumph of Evolution, 1859–1868,” Isis 102 (2011): 393–420, on 402–407.
69 Tyndall to John Parker, 26 May [1860], The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Vol. 7, 166–167, on 167.
70 See n. 65.
71 [William Hopkins], “The Glaciers of the Alps,” Fraser's Magazine 62:372 (December 1860): 793–809, on 809.
72 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), 2.
73 See, for instance, Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1969), 126–127.
74 Darwin to John Murray, 24 September [1861], Darwin Correspondence Project, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-3264.xml (accessed on 12 December 2019).
75 Bellon, “Inspiration in the Harness of Daily Labor.”
76 The following reviews all stressed the impressive martialing of facts the volumes entailed and presented Darwin as symbolic of a careful, inductive scientific observer: [George Henry Lewes], “Darwin on Domestication and Variation,” Pall Mall Gazette, 10 February 1868, 11; “Mr. Darwin's Last Work,” The Spectator, 14 March 1868, 318–319; “Mr. Darwin on Domestication,” The Saturday Review, 14 March 1868, 358–359; “Mr. Darwin in ‘Artificial Selection,’” The London Review, 7 March 1868, 178–179; “Mr. Charles Darwin's New Book,” The Manchester Guardian, 8 April 1868; “Mr. Darwin's New Work,” The Daily Telegraph, 20 February 1868; [William Boyd Dawkins], “Darwin on the Variation of Animals and Plants,” The Edinburgh Review 128:262 (October 1868): 414–450; [William Sweetland Dallas], “Mr. Darwin's Theories,” Westminster Review 91:25 (January 1869): 207–227. Even The Athenaeum, which continued its long-running criticism of Darwin's researches, had to admit that Variation was ‘a valuable storehouse of facts for curious students and practical breeders’. [John Robertson], “The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication,” The Athenaeum, 15 February 1868, 243–244, on 244.
77 For reviews that ignored or said little about Pangenesis see [Lewes], “Darwin on Domestication and Variation”; “Mr. Darwin's New Work,” The Daily Telegraph; and [Dallas], “Mr. Darwin's Theories.” For an extensive analysis of the reception of pangenesis that focuses on how pangenesis was viewed in light of natural selection see Kate Holterhoff, “The History and Reception of Charles Darwin's Hypothesis of Pangenesis,” Journal of the History of Biology 47 (2014): 661–695.
78 See, for instance, Alvar Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin's Theory in the Periodical Press, 1859–1872 (1858; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 57–59.
79 Jim Endersby, “Darwin on Generation, Pangenesis and Sexual Selection,” in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, ed. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick, 2nd edn (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009), 73–95, on 86.
80 Hooker to Darwin, [3 March 1868], Darwin Correspondence Project, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-5971.xml (accessed 2 April 2020); and Huxley to Darwin, 16 July 1865, Darwin Correspondence Project, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-4875.xml (accessed 30 November 2019).
81 John Tyndall, “Scientific Materialism,” in Fragments of Science, 6th edn, Vol. 2, (London: Longmans, 1879), 75–90, on 81.
82 Tyndall, “Scientific Materialism,” 89.
83 Daniel Brown, The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 148.
84 For further details on these experiments see John Tyndall, Essays on the Floating-Matter of the Air in Relation to Putrefaction and Infection (London: Longmans, Green, 1881); and Jackson, The Ascent of John Tyndall, 241–280.
85 Tyndall, “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” Fragments of Science, 101–136, on 104.
86 For Tyndall's embrace of the imagination as an important epistemic virtue for the man of science see Léjon Saarloos, “Virtues of Courage and Virtues of Restraint: Tyndall, Tait and the Use of the Imagination in Late Victorian Science,” in Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities, ed. J. van Dongen and H. Paul (Leiden: Springer, 2017): 109–128.
87 Tyndall, “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” 128.
88 Tyndall, “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” 128.
89 Tyndall, “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” 129.
90 Darwin to Tyndall, 8 September 1870, Darwin Correspondence Project, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-7319 (accessed 11 January 2019).
91 Hooker to Darwin, 24 September 1870, Darwin Correspondence Project, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-7323 (accessed 11 January 2019).
92 The Times, 19 September 1870, 9.
93 See, for instance, Bernard Lightman, “The Victorians: Tyndall and Draper,” in The Warfare between Science and Religion: The Idea That Wouldn't Die, ed. Jeff Hardin, Ronald L. Numbers, and Ronald A. Binzley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 65–83.
94 Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” Fragments of Science, 137–203, on 148.
95 Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” 156–157.
96 Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” 175–176.
97 Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” 181.
98 Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” 199.
99 For the general response to Tyndall's Belfast Address see Ursula DeYoung, A Vision of Science, 114–123; and Bernard Lightman, “Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press: Tyndall's Belfast Address,” in Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004), 199–237.
100 See, for instance, Bernard Lightman, “The Victorians: Tyndall and Draper”; and Ruth Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist: A Rereading of the Belfast Address,” Osiris 3 (1987): 111–134. On the nuances of the science vs. religion narrative see James C. Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).
101 Lightman, “Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press,” 202.
102 “Professor Tyndall's Address,” 237.
103 [John Tulloch], “Modern Scientific Materialism,” 528.
104 Tyndall, “Personal Recollections of Thomas Carlyle,” 28.