The Making of John Tyndall's Darwinian Revolution

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The making of John Tyndall's Darwinian Revolution

Ian Hesketh

To cite this article: Ian Hesketh (2020) The making of John Tyndall's Darwinian Revolution, Annals of Science, 77:4, 524-548, DOI: 10.1080/00033790.2020.1808243 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00033790.2020.1808243

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=tasc20 ANNALS OF SCIENCE 2020, VOL. 77, NO. 4, 524–548 https://doi.org/10.1080/00033790.2020.1808243

The making of John Tyndall’s Darwinian Revolution Ian Hesketh Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY One of the most influential imagined histories of science of Received 21 April 2020 the nineteenth century was John Tyndall’s Belfast Address Accepted 5 August 2020 of 1874. In that address, Tyndall presented a sweeping KEYWORDS history of science that focused on the attempt to Tyndall; Darwin; evolution; understand the material nature of life. While the address biography; historiography 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.

In life you must use men as you use their biographies. -John Tyndall, Lecture on James Watt, Queenwood College, 1847 When the physicist John Tyndall died in 1893, his popularity was attributed not necessarily to his own significant scientific advancements, but rather to the fact that he was ‘a leading exponent to the people of the Darwinian theory’.1 In the last twenty-five years of his life, Tyndall’s public addresses tended to stress the importance of Darwinian evolution in bringing together disparate fields of research while pushing the boundaries of science into realms previously beyond its purview. Most notable in this regard was Tyndall’s Presidential Address at the British Association meeting in Belfast in 1874, which offered a sweeping history of science that focused on the conflict between science and

CONTACT Ian Hesketh [email protected] 1P. Chalmers Mitchell, “Professor Tyndall,” The New Review 10:56 (January 1894): 77–85, on 80. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. ANNALS OF SCIENCE 525

theology and culminated in a discussion of evolution and the researches of Charles Darwin. Tyndall stressed in Belfast and in other addresses, that Darwin was the embodiment of a living historical figure, a great man who had, through his devotion to a particular set of epistemic virtues, brought about a revolution in science. 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’.2 But what such critics failed to realize is that Tyndall had historicized the living Darwin within the context of a philosophy of history that he had cultivated many years before, a philosophy that integrated the moral lives of heroic individuals within a progressive history of science itself. For a leading exponent of Darwin and Darwinism, however, Tyndall was rather late in bringing his voice and intellectual resources to bear on the evolution debates. Despite the fact that Tyndall was part of what Ruth Barton has called the X-network, a group of naturalists who would go on to form the X Club and found in Darwin’s Origin of Species a key work that needed to be defended in public for the benefit of their naturalist agenda, he did not initially take part in this campaign.3 Indeed, as Roland Jackson has pointed out, when the Origin of Species was published in 1859, Tyndall’s ‘immediate reactions … are hidden from us’ as there are no references to the book in his journal or extant correspondence.4 Tyndall would, moreover, say nothing publicly in defence of evolution or the Origin until 1870. It is perhaps for this reason that little has been written about Tyndall’s engagements with evolution, particularly in the context of his heroic characterizations of Darwin.5 Indeed, important questions in relation to this remain unanswered. What, for instance, accounts for Tyndall’s lengthy delay? And what does this delay tell us about Tyndall’s eventual defence of Darwin and Darwinian evolution? This article provides an answer to these questions by arguing that Tyndall only came to Darwin’s defense after he realized that Darwin and Darwinian evolution could be fitted within his own idealized vision of science, one that was informed by his early intellectual and scientific development. Tyndall regarded science as a form of knowledge that progressed due to the morally driven actions of great men. His devotion to self-improvement, along with his reading of Thomas Carlyle and of scientific biographies, shaped this idea, which then informed his scientific practices and his admiration for particularly deserving contemporaries. This worship of contemporaries was first explicitly expressed, not by his relationship with Darwin, however, but rather by his

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.” 3Ruth Barton, The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 184– 185. 4Roland Jackson, The Ascent of John Tyndall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 150. 5Tyndall’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. 526 I. HESKETH

relationship with, and writings about, the celebrated British experimentalist, Michael Faraday. Bernard Lightman has suggested that it was his relationship with Faraday that accounts for Tyndall’s failure to engage in controversial subject matter while Faraday was alive (he died in 1867), and this may be, at the very least, partly the case.6 However, in light of Tyndall’s early interest in cosmic evolutionism, as expressed in his reading of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, along with the nature of his own scientific researches that led him to draw con- nections between the ultramicroscopic world of atoms and particles and the largescale world of atmospheric forces and cosmic energy, Darwin’s Origin might have struck Tyndall as remarkably narrow. More particularly, Tyndall was, at the time of the Origin’s early reception engaged in his own controversy surrounding the publication of his book on glaciers. More significantly, Tyn- dall’s work did not come into direct conversation with Darwin’s until Darwin’s Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication appeared in 1868 and not only provided much of the detailed factual basis for many of the claims in the Origin in regard to artificial selection but also sought to make sense of inheritance at the molecular scale. This was a scale for thinking about evolution that Tyndall found particularly relevant to his own burgeoning work on air-borne particles, or what he called ‘floating matter’. Moreover, as we will see when we consider Tyndall’s belated discussions of evolution, he was clearly interested in evolution as providing an approach that could connect the molecular and the cosmic, the inorganic and the organic.7 He was, in this regard, much more invested in Darwin’s theory of pangenesis than in the theory of natural selection, and tended to stress evolution’s broader meaning rather than the particulars of Darwin’s theory. It was, therefore, the historical figure of Darwin that became prominent in Tyndall’s belated intervention, as Darwin came to represent in Tyndall’s history of science an idealized scientific practitioner uniquely capable of transcending the contemporary boundaries of knowledge.

1. Development through hero worship For Tyndall, the history of science was best understood biographically, as the product of great men. This was an insight he developed quite early on, well before he embraced science as his vocation. While much recent work on Tyndall has shed light on his early background and the development of his scien- tiﬁc identity, what has yet to be explored in this regard is how history, construed

6Bernard Lightman, “Fashioning the Victorian Man of Science: Tyndall’s Shifting Strategies,” Journal of Dialectics of Nature 38 (2015): 25–38. 7For 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. ANNALS OF SCIENCE 527

as biography, became central to Tyndall’s understanding of science.8 Indeed, his own identity formation became deeply entangled with just such an ‘imagined history of science’, one where science progressed due to the moralistic actions of heroic ﬁgures who confronted enormous challenges in order to beneﬁt humanity as a whole.9 Tyndall embraced this view as a young man, as he sought to improve his station in life. While he came from a poor Protestant family in Northern Ireland, his father made sure that Tyndall received an education, and kept him in school until he was about eighteen, at which time he joined the Irish Ord- nance survey. Later in life Tyndall remembered that even at a very early age he was ‘fond of Natural Philosophy’ and recalled

when quite a lad, borrowing a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was almost as large as myself, and reading the chapters on Aerostation, Electricity and Phlogiston with intense pleasure. I made balloons at the time, and manufactured gas to the infinite annoyance of almost everybody but myself. He also remembered that ‘My poor father used to inspire me sometimes by calling me Newton’.10 This interest in science along with its great historic figures only grew as he sought to further his education by attending mechanics’ institute lectures as well as through his own reading while he worked in a variety of capacities for different survey projects in Northern Ireland and then Northern England in the early to mid 1840s. He became devoted, as did many of his generation and class who sought to improve themselves, to what he called ‘self- culture’, a term used to describe one’s devotion to spiritual, moral, and intellectual development that was later codified in the series of works on ‘self-help’ by Samuel Smiles.11 Much has been previously written about Tyndall’s enthusiasm for the philosophy of Thomas Carlyle, whose work Tyndall encountered in the midst of his self-development.12 He read Past and Present (1843) and embraced the idea of a nobility of soul that could be developed in anyone willing to put in the hard work. What truly mattered in the development of a man, according to

8On 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: Pick- ering & Chatto, 2007). 9The 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. 10Tyndall 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. 11See, 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. 12See 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 Univer- sity Press, 1993), 131–150; and Hesketh, “Technologies of the Scientific Self,” 466–469. 528 I. HESKETH

Carlyle, was an unflinching devotion to pursuing a certain set of moral virtues that would be adhered to no matter the cost, an ideal that Tyndall found quite attractive.13 He, moreover, soon after encountered Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840), and found that Carlyle’s claim about the importance of understanding the past as shaped by virtuous great men accorded well with his own understanding about how history had progressed.14 It is true that Carlyle said very little about science, and a case could be made that he was explicitly hostile to it. Tyndall, however, did not read Carlyle in this way, as he would later explain, finding Carlyle’s insights about intellectual labour and morality entirely relevant to the development of science. And he believed, moreover, that Carlyle would have found the ‘Hero as Man of Science’ a fitting theme for his work.15 Indeed, what is perhaps less well understood about Tyndall is that much of his self-education in the 1840s involved learning about great men of science. One book that Tyndall often found himself reading at the mechanics’ institutes was the anonymous Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties (1830–31), published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.16 The two- volume book was essentially a series of biographical sketches of important literary and scientific figures who sought to acquire and produce knowledge despite doing so under difficult social circumstances. The point of the book was to show, through examples, how a focused devotion to knowledge could be achieved despite the most profound obstacles. Even though the book’s key examples included such important historical figures as Newton, Galileo, and Benjamin Franklin, the message was that with the right effort such knowledge was available to anyone willing to put in the hard work. As was explained in the first chapter:

Every man has diﬃculties to encounter in this pursuit [for knowledge]; and therefore every man is interested in learning what are the real hindrances which have opposed themselves to the progress of some of the most distinguished persons, and how those obstacles have been surmounted.17

13John 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. 14Tyndall, Journal, 6 August 1847, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/241–243. 15Tyndall, “Personal Recollections of Thomas Carlyle,” 28. 16See, 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). ANNALS OF SCIENCE 529

This was a message that the young Tyndall found quite applicable to his own situation and devotion to self-culture. The book’s central message was that these great men were able to overcome their difficulties not necessarily because they were geniuses (although they were), but because they remained devoted to a set of virtues that guided them in their endeavours. Such virtues included ‘the duties of steadiness, diligence, husband- ing of time, concentration of attention, and every other quality which depends upon the exercise of self-command or self-denial’. By learning about how these great men in the past relied on the overarching virtue of self-denial, the book argued that the examples ‘will go farther to render him [the reader] a useful and even influential member of society, than if he were to make himself master of all the learning that ever was stored up in libraries’.18 Newton, for instance, was praised not for his discovery of gravity but for the patience he displayed in publicizing this new law of science. Newton continued working away at the subject until all of the problems were worked out. It was only once Newton could demonstrate the existence of gravity beyond any reasonable doubt that he moved to have those results published. This was presented in the Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties as a profound act of self- denial that was central to what made Newton a great man of science.19 This theme of Newton’s patience was one Tyndall would return to again and again as he developed his own scientific practices later in the decade.20 The other biographical sketch from Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties that explicitly influenced Tyndall was the sketch of James Watt, whose important inventions and improvements to existing technologies were deemed to have changed the world. Again, though, it was not Watt’s genius that was stressed but rather his ‘extraordinary ardour and perseverance’ that was most important and thereby enabled his world-changing technological advances.21 The difficulties Watt had to overcome were twofold. He came from limited means, but he also suffered throughout his life from a ‘delicate state of health’.22 It was because of Watt’s intense labour and ‘unwearied diligence’ that he was able to overcome these difficulties and ‘revolutionize the whole domain of human industry’ while bringing immeasurable benefits to humanity as a whole.23 We know that the book, and the historical sketches that it contained, influenced Tyndall’s burgeoning scientific identity as well as his historical understanding of science because he clearly utilized these resources when he began teaching at Queenwood College in 1847. Queenwood College was an

18[Craik], The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties, Vol. 1, 419. 19[Craik], The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties, Vol. 1, 7. 20For 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. 530 I. HESKETH

experimental school for boys that taught agriculture and, what was unusual at the time, science. Tyndall was initially hired to teach mathematics and surveying. Eventually his duties expanded to include subjects in chemistry and physics. He approached much of this material biographically, by instructing his subjects through the previous discoveries and innovations of great men. He did this because he was not just expected to teach science but also to demonstrate to the boys how to become virtuous men who would be able to then learn things for themselves.24 This is particularly apparent for the ‘The Steam Engine’ section that he taught with Edward Frankland as part of a general course on science.25 For two of the lectures in this section, Tyndall discussed the life of James Watt, giving a sketch of Watt’s life in connection with his scientific innovations, not unlike the sketch of Watt’s life that appeared in the Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties.26 In the concluding part of the final lecture, which he wrote out in his journal, Tyndall explained why he spent so much time discussing Watt’s life. He did so not just to put Watt’s technological ingenuities into a broader biographical context, but also to provide an example for his students to follow as they developed intellectually and morally. After explaining how Watt had ‘applied himself to the naked facts of the case … and moulded them into beauty’, he hoped that, should his students ‘read his biography aright, you may gather strength from his example’.27 It was important to study men like Watt because, Tyndall argued, they can provide a model for character development as well as for increasing knowledge. Tyndall stressed, however, that the boys should look not just to the great men of the past, but to their contemporaries as well. ‘In life’, Tyndall explained, ‘you must use men as you use their biographies … . Be ever ready to listen to the dic- tates of experience, but never forget that the experiences of a lifetime are poor in comparison with the demands of the human soul’. Tyndall’s point was that life was comparatively short when considered alongside the entirety of human experience. Individual human memory was ‘like a reservoir without a spring’. The boys should therefore ‘worship’ past and current figures, but only those who are worthy of their ‘reverence’, to learn from in order to further their own development. Accepting this practice was part of a process of becoming a man, of ‘throw[ing] aside the child’s rattle’ and embracing ‘a higher occupation’.28 Tyndall would soon after this lecture take his own advice and seek a higher occupation by pursuing a doctorate at Marburg University in Germany, studying mathematics, physics, chemistry, and philosophy. While he found many

24D. Thompson, “Queenwood College, Hampshire,” Annals of Science 11:3 (1955): 246–254. 25Thompson, “Queenwood College, Hampshire,” 250. 26Tyndall, Journal, 25 November 1847, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/270; and 2 Dec 1847, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/278. 27Tyndall, Journal, 22 February 1848, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/298. 28Tyndall, Journal, 22 February 1848, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/298–299. ANNALS OF SCIENCE 531

professors there to admire, including most notably his chemistry professor Robert Bunsen, it was not until he finished his studies and began searching for work in England that he found a contemporary who was truly worthy of worship. This was the celebrated English experimentalist and superintendent of the Royal Institution (RI), Michael Faraday. Tyndall came into contact with Faraday when he began experimenting on the contested phenomenon known as diamagnetism.29 Despite the fact that his own results contradicted some of Faraday’s on the subject, Tyndall was encouraged by Faraday to continue pursuing this line of experimental research, even if it might in the end show that Faraday was wrong.30 After receiving some of Tyn- dall’s early published work in 1851, Faraday continued to encourage Tyndall, and explained to him why it was important to follow the truth of nature no matter where it led. ‘Nature is our kindest friend and best critic (exciter?) in the experimental science if we only allow her intimations to fall unbiassed on our minds’. He continued writing that ‘nothing is so good as an experiment which whilst it sets an error right gives us a reward for our humility in being refreshed by an absolute advancement in knowledge[.]’31 Tyndall was delighted by this understanding response that put the progress of science above any personal interests Faraday may have had. After reading the letter, he wrote in his journal, ‘Surely if ever advice was backed by living example, this is: for where could we match Faraday as a “worker.” His productiveness astonishes – almost frightens me’. For Tyndall, Faraday was the perfect ‘living example’ of the ideal scientific ‘worker’.32 As well as becoming an example for Tyndall to follow, Faraday also became Tyndall’s patron, as he helped to secure a position for Tyndall at the RI, first as lecturer and then as Professor of Natural Philosophy. It was while at the RI that their relationship grew as Tyndall fully embraced Faraday, as what he called his ‘brave, noble, affectionate scientific father’.33 Tyndall wrote in his journal that it was a ‘great blessing to be near this man [Faraday]’, and because of that ‘one feels one’s own manhood increased by contact with such a man’.34 Soon after Tyndall began at the RI, therefore, Faraday became Tyndall’s mentor as Tyndall explicitly made the decision always to follow Faraday’s advice. Faraday thus guided Tyndall when it came to accepting or rejecting other lecture positions, about disputes he had with fellow experimentalists, and about the direction of his own researches. Most notably, he sought Faraday’s advice when he was initially chosen as one of the winners of the Royal Society’s Royal Medal in 1853, but then learned later that his selection had been called into question by some members of the society. It was only after learning that

29Roland Jackson, “John Tyndall and the Early History of Diamagnetism,” Annals of Science 72 (2015): 435–489. 30Barton, The X Club, 119. 31Michael Faraday to Tyndall, 19 April 1851, in The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Vol. 3, 205. 32Tyndall, Journal, 28 April [1851], Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/6/539. 33Tyndall, Journal, 12 June 1857, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13c/940. 34Tyndall, Journal, 28 October 1853, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/6/630. 532 I. HESKETH

Faraday had rejected a government pension, when he was similarly oﬀended by the Prime Minister, that Tyndall decided not to accept the medal.35 He wrote the following in his journal after he made his decision: ‘I shall do nothing except what Faraday clearly approves of. That man knows me and trusts me and I know him. It is surprising how soon two clear and upright minds ﬁnd each other out’.36 The following year he made a similar statement to his good friend Thomas Hirst. ‘I feel it a privilege to be able to attest my loyalty to such a man [Faraday] in his declining years’, he wrote to Hirst;

and I trust I shall never do any thing which he might wish I had not done; for I think the noblest reward I can offer to such a man is the free reverence of a free soul; and it is a benefit to myself to find an objective outflow for this reverence.37 Tyndall’s reverence for Faraday grew in subsequent years and he eventually committed his appreciation of Faraday to print in Faraday as a Discoverer (1868).38 Published the year after Faraday died, the book was not meant to present the life of Faraday but rather to provide ‘some notion of what he has done in the world; dwelling incidentally on the spirit in which his work was exe- cuted, and introducing such personal traits as may be necessary to the com- pletion of your picture of the philosopher’.39 Tyndall thus presented what he felt to be Faraday’s key contributions to science, largely taking the reader step-by-step through several of Faraday’s experimental discoveries while situat- ing them within brief accounts of the relevant subject matter. While Tyndall was adamant that the book was not meant to give a complete idea of Faraday ‘the man’, much of the narrative focused on the inherent connection between Fara- day’s ‘character’ and his discoveries. For instance, in his discussion of Faraday’s discovery of magneto-electricity, Tyndall highlighted for the reader ‘a power which Faraday possessed in an extraordinary degree’. This power, Tyndall explained, was a combination of ‘vast strength’ and ‘perfect flexibility’.

His momentum was that of a river, which combines weight and directness with the ability to yield to the ﬂexures of its bed. The intentness of his vision in any direction did not apparently diminish his power of perception in other directions; and when he attacked a subject, expecting results, he had the faculty of keeping his mind alert, so that results diﬀerent from those which he expected should not escape him through pre-occupation.40

35For 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. 36Tyndall, Journal, 8 Nov 1853, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/6/633. 37Tyndall to Thomas Hirst, [12 February 1854], in The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Vol. 4: January 1853–Decem- ber 1854, ed. Ian Hesketh and Efram Sera-Shriar (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 281. 38For 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 (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 171–194, on 173–177. 39John Tyndall, Faraday as a Discoverer (London: Longmans, Green, 1868), 2. 40Tyndall, Faraday as a Discoverer, 20. ANNALS OF SCIENCE 533

This power was enabled, to Tyndall’s mind, by the main aspects of Faraday’s character which combined analogous traits of ‘gentleness and sweetness and ten- derness’ along with an ‘excitable and fiery nature’. But it was ‘through high self- discipline’ that Faraday thus ‘converted the fire into a central glow and motive power of life, instead of permitting it to waste itself in useless passion’. Tyndall explained that ‘Faraday was not slow to anger, but he completely ruled his own spirit, and thus, though he took no cities, he captivated all hearts’.41 Like the heroes Tyndall read about as a young man, Faraday’s key virtue was his self-discipline, which enabled him to channel his observational powers to uncover the truth of nature. With the exception of The Athenaeum, which believed that a more complete biographical account of Faraday’s life would have been more appropriate, the periodical press was glowing in its praise of Tyndall’s Faraday as a Discoverer.42 The Popular Science Review, for instance, recognized that Tyndall had limited his analysis to Faraday as a philosopher. But as Tyndall made clear, Faraday’s character was embedded in his science, so that an analysis of Faraday’s scientific development was necessarily complete:

those who know anything of Faraday are aware that his love of science was so pure and unalloyed, so thoroughly for the pursuit itself rather than the fame which attached to it, that the history of his work, and of his many efforts to search out Nature’s phenomena, is absolutely his whole biography.43 The reviewer argued that because of this the ‘biography should be read by every student of science, no matter to what department he may belong’.44 For J. Scott Russell, writing in Macmillan’s Magazine, Tyndall’s ‘portraits’ of Faraday were ‘drawn with a firm and clear hand, in a gentle and loving spirit, under the gui- dance of a deep insight’. He was particularly to be praised for ‘convey[ing] a right appreciation of Faraday’s character, a clear understanding of the nature of his work, and a just measure of the value of his discoveries’.45 The Saturday Review, meanwhile, stressed the difficult task Tyndall had before him, writing about a universally beloved man whose life was entirely devoted to a single purpose without a hint of scandal. Despite this inherent difficulty, the reviewer believed that the very clear sympathy that Tyndall was able to impart about his subject matter, ‘arising out of a natural kinship of intellect and spirit, and strengthened by union in scientific pursuits and tastes, throws what might otherwise be thought an excessive glow of fervor over the words of the writer’. Tyndall was able to convince the reader that the ‘halo of reverence with which he has felt

41Tyndall, 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. 45J. Scott Russell, “Faraday, A Discoverer,” Macmillan’s Magazine 18 (May 1868): 184–191, on 184. 534 I. HESKETH

constrained to invest’ in Faraday was more than justified.46 Tyndall may have presented Faraday as a scientific hero, but, as was made clear in the reception of Tyndall’s book, that was generally deemed entirely appropriate for a man whose moral character and singularity of purpose led to the most profound scientific discoveries.

2. Tyndall’s delay By the time Tyndall was writing about Faraday’s scientific discoveries in 1868, he was very much part of a generational shift that had occurred in British science over the preceding two decades. Whereas in the early 1850s Tyndall and his good friend Thomas Henry Huxley lamented the patron- and Oxbridge-based nature of British science that seemed destined to continue to exclude them as outsiders, just a few years later both men managed to find regular employment at the centre of scientific life in England, Tyndall at the RI and Huxley at the School of Mines. Moreover, they both went on to form the X Club with a group of like-minded men who sought to shape British science in their own image, a group that included Joseph Hooker, Thomas Hirst, Edward Frankland, and Herbert Spencer, among others. While Ruth Barton has shown that they were not always successful in their various campaigns of reform and influence, they were a powerful force that could not be ignored.47 Barton also points out that one of the key issues that united the X Club was the necessity of ‘[p]romoting Darwin’s reputation and developing his theory in new directions’.48 This was because Darwin’s Origin of Species was an explicitly naturalist account of a subject matter that had previously been curtailed by the theological commitments of an older generation. By promoting Darwin’s naturalist perspective while defending him against the criticism of others, supporters were therefore also defending the larger movement of which the book had become symbolic. Huxley, of course, immediately grasped the revolutionary potential of Darwin’s Origin, and promoted and defended the epoch-making nature of the book in several reviews and in public forums. This was no better demonstrated than the final sentence of his anonymous review of the Origin that appeared in the Westminster Review, where he argued that no work in the last thirty years ‘has appeared calculated to exert so large an influence, not only on the future of Biology, but in extending the domination of Science over regions of thought into which she has, as yet hardly penetrated’.49 Interest- ingly, after receiving his copy of the Westminster, Tyndall went straight to the end of Huxley’s review and read the last paragraph. He wrote to Huxley in order to express ‘the great admiration which the passage excited within me’.

46“Faraday as a Discoverer,” The Saturday Review, 9 May 1868, 619–621, on 620. 47Indeed, 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. 48Barton, 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. ANNALS OF SCIENCE 535

But despite his initial enthusiasm for Huxley’s revolutionary rhetoric with regard to the Origin, Tyndall stayed very much on the sidelines as the debate over the book expanded and intensified, saying very little in private about it, and nothing publicly, at least not until 1870.50 It is certainly true that biological transmutation, and its immediately related subjects, were not at the time areas that Tyndall was researching. But Tyndall was not by any means ignorant when it came to the general subject matter. Moreover, while Tyndall embraced the label of ‘physicist’ to describe his area of expertise, his scientific interests remained quite broadly conceived, and he was particularly interested in the relationship between the micro world of atoms and chemicals and the macro worlds of biology, geology, and cosmology, an interest that he developed in the mid to late 1840s when he was seeking to improve his knowledge. One of the works that influenced Tyndall in this regard was Robert Cham- bers’s anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). By the time Tyndall purchased a copy of the book in July 1847, it had already become a remarkable literary sensation. As is so well documented in James Secord’s Victorian Sensation, Vestiges captured the reading public’s imagination by presenting evolution as a holistic process that explained the development of both inorganic and organic life, from the origins of the solar system in a nebular fire mist to the future development of humanity itself. This argument was moreover presented in a romantic narrative framework that made the evolutionary process seem no less natural than the birth and growth of an individual human being. Of course transmutation, or ‘development’ as Chambers called it, was still a controversial subject at the time, and was generally associated with the writings of Lamarck and, by extension, working-class radicalism. The fact that the book was anonymously published added a layer of intrigue to the controversy, and no doubt helped increase the book’s readership, which was vast and expanding.51 We know Tyndall was influenced by Vestiges because he wrote about it extensively in his journal. After he read the book the first time, he wrote that it was ‘an admirable work’, but he was unsure about all of the author’s deductions. As he was practicing his French at the time, he wrote en français: ‘Entre temps read Vestiges of Creation, an admirable work, quoique peut-être faux dans ses deductions. Je ne sais pas, nous sommes entouré de difficultés’.52 Tyndall does not explain what he thinks the author may wrongly deduce, but he seemed to think that the subject

50Tyndall 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. 51James 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). 52Tyndall, Journal, 7 July 1847, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/228. 536 I. HESKETH

matter itself was surrounded by difficulties. Whatever the case, Tyndall proceeded to read the book again soon afterwards, and would this time write out an analytical summary of the work according to the reading practices that were advised by the mechanics’ institutes, a clear sign that he wanted to understand and master it. In his analytical summary of Vestiges,Tyndall spent a great deal of time working through the details of the nebular hypothesis and the evolution of the solar system.53 He also purchased another copy of the book a few months later and may have given it to his young disciple James (‘Jemmy’) Craven as a gift.54 Craven later wrote to Tyndall about his own plans to write about Vestiges,givenTyndall’s favourable views of the book.55 Later entries in Tyndall’s journal suggest that he began to view the world through ‘Vestigarian’ eyes, as he thereafter often referred to the all importance of self-pres- ervation as the first law of nature, though he also repeated the claim from Vestiges that ‘humanity ought to be and will be … influenced by higher and more disinterested motives’.56 Tyndall also later referred in approval to what Vestiges had to say about the negative effects of poverty on human physiology, writing that he

Met a wretched father, mother and four children who had come to Cork to seek a son and a brother truly the writer of the “Vestiges” speaks well when he says that poverty and low diet has a manifest effect upon the countenance, not a ray of intellect is to be seen shining through the emasculated muscles of their facial physiology, a slothful mopiness and inanity is the prevalent trait.57 The book was clearly influencing the way in which he viewed the world and his surroundings. It is certainly the case that many authoritative men of science were highly critical of Vestiges, as some – rightly it turns out – believed that it was written by a science popularizer. One of Vestiges’s critics was, moreover, Huxley, who wrote a scathing review of the tenth edition of the book in 1853, and in particular criticized the kind of popular scientific knowledge it contained, the kind that ‘might be picked up by reading [the] “Chambers’s Journal’ or the ‘Penny Maga- zine,” a calibre of science, in other words, that could only be found in ‘a Mech- anics’ Institute’.58 But Tyndall was much less dismissive of the kind of knowledge encountered in mechanics’ institutes, precisely because this was where he likely first heard about the book and where it was discussed and

53Tyndall, Journal, 20–22 July 1847, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/231–237. 54Tyndall, Journal, 17 December 1847, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13a/280. 55James Craven to Tyndall, 16 October 1849, in The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Vol. 2: September 1843–Decem- ber 1849, ed. Melinda Baldwin and Janet Browne (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 340. 56Tyndall, 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. 57Tyndall, 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. ANNALS OF SCIENCE 537

debated quite seriously by himself and his friends and associates. One of those associates was future X Club member Thomas Hirst, who was also, like Tyndall, enthusiastic about Vestiges, and even recorded in his journal in 1848 that he witnessed Tyndall defend Vestiges in a heated conversation with the grandson of William Paley. Paley, Hirst complained, was ‘too much inclined to go along with the stream’.59 As we’ll see, Tyndall clearly had no problem with certain aspects of the book, particularly its attempt to ground a theory of development in a grand speculative history of all life; but what he no doubt came to appreciate from reviews such as Huxley’s was that such speculation required a kind of mental and moral discipline that simply could not be achieved by an anonymous popularizer but only by a truly exceptional man of science with a reputation to maintain. In the 1850s Tyndall himself began to speculate more explicitly about the relationship between the micro and macro, between the inorganic and organic, the molecular and the biological. In a lengthy journal entry from 21 June 1855, he argued that all natural processes were ‘due to the action of molecular forces’. At this fundamental level of existence, Tyndall wrote, it must be understood that all natural phenomena were ultimately the same. ‘There is no essential distinction between organic and inorganic; the forces present in the latter case, when duly applied can and must produce, all the phenomena of the former’. This notion of there being a unity of nature, and a natural process that connected all forms of life, whether organic or inorganic, was one he may have learned from reading Vestiges.60 It was around this time, moreover, that Tyndall began to expand his own research interests, specifically to focus on other fundamental properties of nature, such as ice and air. One of these areas of interest was glaciers as Tyndall sought to explore the very large scale ramifica- tions that could be created through the accumulation of the very small. One might think that these interests in evolution and the deeper questions of nature, as well as Tyndall’s burgeoning alliance with some of the figures who would go on to form the X Club, would have led Tyndall to join Huxley and others in coming to Darwin’s defense. But this is not what transpired. Indeed, when Darwin’s book was published Tyndall was somewhat preoccupied with finishing the research for his own book, Glaciers of the Alps, which was published a few months after the Origin in 1860, and then subsequently dealing with its reception. While the book was obviously nowhere near as earth-shattering as Darwin’s was, it was controversial in a more limited sense because of the way in which Tyndall dealt with competing theories of glacial movement.61 If the first half of the book was largely a narrative of Tyndall’s

59Thomas 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. 60Tyndall, Journal, 21 June 1855, Tyndall Papers, RI MS JT/2/13c/761–762. 61John 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 11 538 I. HESKETH

various ascents of glacial alps in Switzerland, the second part dealt with the physics of glaciers. In this section Tyndall continued, and intensified, his debate with James David Forbes about the correct way to think about the action of glaciers. But he also went further than he had previously by suggesting that Forbes was not even the originator of these competing views, thereby touching off a priority dispute that would last for several years.62 Tyndall was therefore understandably anxious about the book’s reception and sought to organize friendly reviews. One of the possible reviewers that he approached was the mathematician and physicist William Hopkins, who Tyndall had known for several years. When Tyndall approached Hopkins about the possibility of writing a review of The Glaciers of the Alps, Hopkins had to admit that he had ‘just finished a Review of Darwin for Fraser’, and that he anticipated that the review would not be appreciated by Darwin – or by his friends, most notably Huxley. Hopkins thus wrote: ‘Tell your friend Huxley he mustn’t quarrel with me for dealing severely with his friend’s theory. I like scientific freedom, with personal courtesy, but I hate scientific quarrelling’.63 Hopkins’s review was, in some ways, overshadowed by the fact that it was published in the same month that Huxley famously clashed with the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, about the evidence for Darwin’s theory of evolution, at the British Association meeting in Oxford in 1860.64 But Hopkins’s review was not ignored; Darwin referred to it in the same letters that referenced the great battle in Oxford, and rightly perceived it to be part of a growing opposition to the Origin.65 Hopkins’s review was polite, and referred to the ‘high respect in which the author [Darwin] is universally held, both as a man and a naturalist’.66 However, Hopkins went on to contrast what he called Darwin’s ‘method of assertion’ with Newton’s method of induction, arguing that whereas Newton ‘demonstrates’, Darwin typically only speculates. Perhaps most damaging, he suggested that because Darwin’s theory was largely based on speculations, it was not much of an advancement from Lamarck’s or even that of the Vestiges. Like Lamarck’s theory of use inheritance, and the Vestiges concerning development via embryonic development, natural selection was a theory that lacked

(1996): 66–86; and Michael S. Reidy, “Mountaineering, Masculinity, and the Male Body in Mid-Victorian Britain,” Osiris 30 (2015): 158–181. 62See Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund, “A Frosty Disagreement: John Tyndall, James David Forbes, and the Early For- mation of the X-Club,” Annals of Science 74:4 (2017): 282–298. 63W. 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. 64Ian Hesketh, Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 65See, 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). 66William Hopkins, “Physical Theories of the Phenomena of Life, Part I,” Fraser’s Magazine 61:366 (June 1860): 739– 752, on 751. ANNALS OF SCIENCE 539

demonstrable proof. ‘There is a strange mutability in the fate of vague and doubtful theories’, argued Hopkins.

That of the Vestiges attracted a large share of public attention, and is now almost as much forgotten as Lamarck’s. Mr. Darwin’s is unquestionably of the same kind. The history of those which have preceded it appears to us to be ominous of its future destiny.67 This was a damaging critique, and would come to inform a growing critical lit- erature that found that Darwin’s Origin had departed from the proper principles of scientific investigation.68 Perhaps most significant for our purposes, however, is that Tyndall was clearly not bothered, as were Huxley and Darwin, by Hopkins’s review. This is evidenced by the fact that after Hopkins told him about his critical review, Tyndall still wrote to John Parker, the editor of Fraser’s Magazine, to request that Hopkins be asked to review his own book, and he even used Hopkins’s forthcoming review of the Origin as evidence of Hopkins’s abilities. Tyndall stressed in his letter to Parker that Hopkins was one of the few in England who were competent enough to review his book, and that he also had the requi- site character to write a properly disinterested review: ‘his high character and scientific eminence are in themselves a sufficient guarantee that any thing he might write would be both able and impartial’, Tyndall wrote.69 Clearly, at this point at least, Tyndall did not think that Hopkins’s critical view of the Origin would in any way cause Hopkins to view his own work with a sceptical eye. So while Darwin and Huxley were wringing their hands over the many negative reviews of the Origin that were appearing, such as those by Wilberforce, Richard Owen, and, indeed, by Hopkins, Tyndall was preoccupied with organiz- ing a review of his own book and did not seem to mind if it was written by one of Darwin’s new critics.70 For his part, Hopkins found Tyndall’s book a model of scientific investigation: ‘it is an encouraging circumstance that the progress of the subject is now brought to depend on accurate experiment, and not on vague assumptions and loose mechanical reasoning’.71 The different reception that Hopkins gave Tyndall’s book in comparison with Darwin’s goes some way to shed light on the different kind of science the two men pursued, at least from the perspective of a physicist: Tyndall’s was inductive, experimental, and demonstrative; whereas Darwin’s was deductive, speculative, and assertive. Tyndall, therefore, may not have appreciated the novelty of Darwin’s approach, or how it might contribute

67William Hopkins, “Physical Theories of the Phenomena of Life, Part II,” Fraser’s Magazine 62:367 (July 1860): 74–90, on 86. 68Richard 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. 69Tyndall to John Parker, 26 May [1860], The Correspondence of John Tyndall, Vol. 7, 166–167, on 167. 70See n. 65. 71[William Hopkins], “The Glaciers of the Alps,” Fraser’s Magazine 62:372 (December 1860): 793–809, on 809. 540 I. HESKETH

to his own physical researches, at least at the time. It is also quite possible that he agreed with Hopkins that the theory of natural selection would in time be as forgotten as Lamarck’s and that of Vestiges appeared to be. Darwin was not yet, it would seem, worthy of worship.

3. Tyndall’s Darwinian Revolution Tyndall remained silent throughout most of the 1860s as well, even after the X Club was formed and its members began defending and promoting Darwin’s work as a matter of course. However, Tyndall became more explicitly involved in the campaign soon after Darwin’s two-volume Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication was published in 1868. While Variation gets little attention in the historiography of the Darwinian Revolution, at the time it was interpreted as an important supplement, if not sequel, to the Origin of Species. This is because the Origin, as Darwin stressed in its introduction, was just an ‘abstract’ of his theory of evolution that he was ultimately forced to have published due to his ill health along with the realization that Alfred Russel Wallace had come to similar conclusions as his own regarding the theory of natural selection. The Origin was therefore missing references and many important factual details upon which Darwin’s theory of evolution was based. He recognized, however, ‘the necessity of hereafter publishing in detail all the facts, with references, on which my conclusions have been grounded; and I hope in a future work to do this’.72 Variation was, therefore, an attempt to fulfil at least part of this promise by providing the immense body of facts that underpinned just the first chapter of the Origin, on domestic breeding. Darwin started work on Variation soon after the Origin was published and hoped, as he suggested to others, that writing it would simply involve ‘arranging his notes’.73 This would turn out not to be the case as he suffered endless delays due to his worsening ill health while becoming interested in other side projects. He remained committed, however, to finishing the volumes because he wanted to show that, despite some of the critical commentary surrounding the Origin,he was a careful scientific observer who followed an appropriate scientific method and, as he told his publisher John Murray, ‘worked hard at details’.74 The book, moreover, showed a side of Darwin that was not apparent in Origin, though it became more evident with his 1862 little book on orchids – that he was capable of careful experimental work, particularly when it came to botany.75 Variation further entrenched this aspect of Darwin’s work. Moreover, Variation was typically well received, largely putting to rest any suggestion that Darwin

72Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), 2. 73See, for instance, Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1969), 126–127. 74Darwin to John Murray, 24 September [1861], Darwin Correspondence Project, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/ letter/DCP-LETT-3264.xml (accessed on 12 December 2019). 75Bellon, “Inspiration in the Harness of Daily Labor.” ANNALS OF SCIENCE 541

was not a careful man of science or that he had been too hasty in publishing his theory of evolution.76 It is true that Darwin included a ‘speculative hypothesis’ in the penultimate chapter on the actual mechanics of inheritance, a theory Darwin dubbed ‘pangenesis’, but as it was not integrated throughout the book, it was possible for critics of the theory to ignore it entirely or view it as an unfortunate misstep in an otherwise persuasive analysis of the plasticity of domestic animals and plants.77 The year 1868 is often considered the moment when it became clear that the tide had turned definitively in evolution’s favour; the publishing of Variation is an important aspect of that larger story.78 Most importantly for our purposes, however, is that this is when Darwin’s work came into more explicit conversation with Tyndall’s. With pangenesis, in particular, Darwin sought to uncover the actual workings of inheritance at the molecular level by trying to think through how certain ancestral traits were passed on to offspring while others were not. Darwin postulated that atomic units in the body threw off what he called gemmules, tiny cellular particles that could not be seen but for Darwin simply had to exist to make sense of the many confounding facts of inheritance.79 It was the unobservable dimension of pangenesis that ultimately led to fairly widespread opposition to the theory, including some of Darwin’s closest friends and defenders such as Huxley and Hooker. Huxley convinced Darwin to stress the ‘hypothetical’ nature of the theory, while Hooker suggested that Darwin’s ‘atoms & germs & gemules & so forth’ could only be understood as ‘purely arbitrary quantities’. Hooker recognized, however, that Darwin’s own views about the reality of gemmules was much closer to Tyndall’s line of thinking when it came to unobserved particles: ‘Tyndall believes he feels, atoms as firmly as St Paul believed he saw Christ’.80 Indeed, for Tyndall, Variation was a revelation.

76The 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 Vari- ation,” 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 Selec- tion,’” 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 Sweet- land 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. 77For 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. 78See, 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. 79Jim 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. 80Hooker 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). 542 I. HESKETH

Tyndall’s first public foray into the evolution debates was a subtle one in the form of an address to the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association in Norwich on 19 August 1868. On the topic of the ‘Scope and Limit of Scientific Materialism’, he sought to show that at a deeply fundamental level there was a unity between the inorganic and organic worlds, making public a view he had written about in his journal thirteen years before. He argued that whether organic or inorganic, there is a force underpinning all matter that causes it ‘to organize itself, to grow into shape, to assume definite forms’.81 He then compared the development of a crystal of salt with that of a grain of corn: at the level of the particle, the architecture and growth of each resembles more than it differs. Tyndall admitted, however, that such a mechanical approach to the development of matter had its limits, but only in regard to something as mysterious as consciousness when the material processes of nature lead from the construction of the brain to thought. ‘The problem of the connection of body and soul is as insoluble in its modern form as it was in the prescientific ages’, Tyndall argued.82 Daniel Brown has gone so far as to suggest that Tyndall’s argument in this address about the self-organization of life, from the atom to more complex organic structures, was an argument in favour of an evolutionary process guided by Darwinian natural selection. However, it is important to note that in the address Tyndall did not mention Darwin, evolution, or indeed natural selection. It was, moreover, the materialist connotations that garnered attention, rather than any implied account of molecular evolution.83 Tyndall was, however, beginning a stage in his experimental research on dust or what he called ‘floating matter’ that would lead him to explore issues more directly relevant to the life sciences and evolution. His interest in the relationship between particles and light led him to experiment with the dust in the air. By using beam of light he found that he was able to observe particles that were not even visible with a microscope. And when passing these particles over a flame, which burned them up, Tyndall became convinced that they were organic in nature, leading him to speculate that it was via these organic particles that germs and disease were spread. This research initially resulted in a stunning paper that he delivered at the RI in 1870 on ‘Dust and Disease’ and would lead to further experiments on floating matter that would ultimately undermine the theory of spontaneous generation while supporting the germ theory of disease.84 It is of some significance, therefore, that in the same year Tyndall extended his research on atomic particles to organic matter he also explicitly defended what he claimed was Darwin’s evolutionary account of life. He did so in a much-

81John Tyndall, “Scientiﬁc Materialism,” in Fragments of Science, 6th edn, Vol. 2, (London: Longmans, 1879), 75–90, on 81. 82Tyndall, “Scientiﬁc Materialism,” 89. 83Daniel Brown, The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 148. 84For 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. ANNALS OF SCIENCE 543

debated public lecture that he gave at the 1870 British Association meeting in Liverpool, which made a sustained case for the man of science to utilize his imagination alongside careful experimentation and observation. This was, for Tyndall, the only way that men of science could push the limits of knowledge beyond what is already known. He then proceeded to explain how previous natural philosophers had made the ‘[i]magination … the architect of physical theory’. ‘Newton’s passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was an act of the prepared imagination’, argued Tyndall. It was, moreover, ‘[o]ut of the facts of chemistry the constructive imagination of Dalton formed the atomic theory’. Meanwhile, Faraday’s ‘strength and fertility as a discoverer is to be referred in great part to the stimulus of his imagination’.85 Tyndall believed that cultivating the imagination was an important epistemic virtue that was often underappreciated by many scientific thinkers and the public because of its seemingly anti-empirical connotations. But, Tyndall stressed, without the imagination the most sublime scientific discoveries would not have been made. It was a virtue that could, moreover, only be utilized in the direction of science by the most careful of scientific thinkers.86 After describing how the imagination was important to his own research on light and particles, he turned to a discussion of Darwin and evolution, and the need to let a mind such as Darwin’s be free to explore the natural world as it sees fit. It is true that Darwin ‘has drawn heavily upon the scientific tolerances of his age’, Tyndall remarked. This was most recently the case with regard to the way in which ‘he has drawn heavily upon time in his development of species, and he has drawn adventurously upon matter in his theory of pangenesis’. Tyndall clearly appreciated pangenesis, which postulated that even at the level of the microscopic germ is a deeper, ultramicroscopic ‘world of minor germs. Not only is the organism as a whole wrapped up in the germ, but every organ of the organism has there its special seed’. For Tyndall, pangenesis was, therefore, ‘an adventurous draft on the power of matter to divide itself and distribute its forces’. He stressed, moreover, that unless we could be sure that Darwin was ‘sinning against observed fact of demonstrated law’ he should not be limited. This is because Darwin had cultivated a mind that ‘can never sin wit- tingly against either fact or law’. Tyndall argued that it thus gave him

pleasure to think that the facts and reasonings of this discourse tend rather towards the justiﬁcation of Mr. Darwin, than towards his condemnation; for they seem to show the perfect competence of matter and force, as regards divisibility and distribution, to bear the heaviest strain that he has hitherto imposed upon them.87

85Tyndall, “Scientiﬁc Use of the Imagination,” Fragments of Science, 101–136, on 104. 86For Tyndall’s embrace of the imagination as an important epistemic virtue for the man of science see Léjon Saar- loos, “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. 87Tyndall, “Scientiﬁc Use of the Imagination,” 128. 544 I. HESKETH

Tyndall then explained how Darwin combined ‘observation, imagination, and reason’ to establish his more general theory of evolution.88 ‘Guided by analogy’, Tyndall argued, Darwin ‘placed at the root of life a primordial germ, from which he conceived the amazing variety of organisms now upon the earth’s surface might be deduced’. He then connected Darwin’s discovery of evolution with analogous speculations about the origins of the solar system in a nebulous form, speculations that required a similar combination of observation, imagination, and reason but that were also guided by some mysterious desire ‘to connect the present life of our planet with the past’ and ‘to know something of our remotest ancestry’.89 Without mentioning Vestiges, Tyndall essentially said that Darwin’s theory, along with his disciplined imagination, made possible the kind of grand speculations found in Vestiges that connected the cosmic with the geological and the biological. Tyndall was, of course, using Darwin to promote his own particular understanding of the relevance of evolution to science more broadly as well as his growing appreciation of the role the imagination plays in scientiﬁc advancement. Darwin was delighted with Tyndall’s address. ‘Your whole discourse strikes me as grand & most interesting’, Darwin wrote to Tyndall. Tyndall had sent Darwin a draft of the address in order to ensure that he did not say anything that went against Darwin’s own views of the matter. Knowing that pangenesis was compli- cated, Darwin told Tyndall that ‘What you say about Pangenesis is quite correct’. Darwin liked in particular Tyndall’s ‘most happy’ phrase, ‘[n]ot only is the organism as a whole wrapped up in the germ … .’ He was, of course, glad for the support Tyndall indicated with regard to pangenesis, admitting that Tyndall was

a rash man to say a word for Pangenesis, for it has hardly a friend amongst naturalists, yet after long pondering (how true your remarks are on pondering) I feel a deep con- viction that Pangenesis will some day be generally accepted. By this time, Darwin could count very few converts with regard to pangenesis, so he was no doubt glad to count Tyndall among them. ‘What you say about me’, Darwin wrote, ‘coming as it does from you, has pleased me extremely, so much that there must be clouds of vanity in my mind to bring out such pleasant sen- sations as your remarks passed through them’.90 Even while Darwin seemed delighted by Tyndall’s public embrace of his theory of evolution and pangenesis, other supporters of Darwin’s were not so pleased. Hooker, who was present at the address, initially found the discourse ‘quite excellent & the proper sort of thing for the occasion’. But, when Hooker read the address in print form, he was ‘woefully disappointed’.He told Darwin that ‘it reads ornate, frothy & all but ﬂashy, with a soupcon of

88Tyndall, “Scientiﬁc Use of the Imagination,” 128. 89Tyndall, “Scientiﬁc Use of the Imagination,” 129. 90Darwin to Tyndall, 8 September 1870, Darwin Correspondence Project, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP- LETT-7319 (accessed 11 January 2019). ANNALS OF SCIENCE 545

bosh here & there’.91 Hooker had been trying to discourage Darwin from pursuing his pangenesis theorizing any further. And his attempts to stress that Darwin was a careful and empirical scientific observer was a message that less careful readers found contradicted by Tyndall’s focus on Darwin’s reliance on his imagination. As an example, an article in The Times was dismayed by Tyndall’s argument concerning the imagination. The author was unwilling to take a position in regard to evolution but had a strong opinion about the supposed necessity of relying on the imagination to come to a conclusion about such a difficult subject matter. ‘[W]e look to men of Science’, argued The Times, ‘rather for observation than for imagination’.92 It was for views like the one found in The Times that led Hooker to believe that Tyndall’s belated intervention into the evolution debates would do more harm than good. Tyndall would, however, not be deterred. He therefore revisited many of these same themes a few years later when he gave his now well-known Belfast Address in 1874. While Tyndall said little this time about the imaginative dimension of science, the address was even more controversial than the one in Liverpool. This is because, rather than putting the year’s key scientific advancements in a historical context, as was customary of presidential addresses, he gave a sweeping history of science that focussed specifically on the attempts to understand the material nature of life within the context of a long-running conflict between science and theology. It was also traditional for the president to comment on the relationship between science and religion, but typically the theme of harmony was stressed, not that of conflict. For this reason the address has been understandably examined in regard to its role in promoting a narrative of conflict, and the way in which Tyndall brought to bear on his theme the historical arguments found in the works of John William Draper and Albert Lange.93 What is relevant for our purposes, however, is how Tyndall situated his central discussion of evolution within his history of science, one that posi- tioned Darwin as a living historical and heroic figure. Tyndall began his address by discussing the atomists of the ancient period whose early speculations regarding matter and life were, he argued, remarkable anticipations of contemporary views on the subject. These advances came to a dramatic halt in the Middle Ages, however, as Christianity expanded: its Scrip- tures might have ministered to the spiritual needs of its followers, but they were also what he called, the ‘measure of their Science’. Science itself was ‘[t]hus reined in’, argued Tyndall, and scientific progress was further problematized by ‘the political and theological strife between Church and civil government’.94

91Hooker to Darwin, 24 September 1870, Darwin Correspondence Project, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP- LETT-7323 (accessed 11 January 2019). 92The Times, 19 September 1870, 9. 93See, 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. 94Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” Fragments of Science, 137–203, on 148. 546 I. HESKETH

This long stationary period finally came to an end with Copernicus’s astronom- ical discoveries, but not before Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for his Copernican beliefs while Galileo, who did so much to advance the heliocentric doctrine, was forced to reject it on his knees with a hand on the Bible just to avoid Bruno’s fate.95 By the time Tyndall’s historical narrative progressed to a discussion of Darwin and the nineteenth century, he had described a Christian cosmology in clear retreat due to successive scientific advances, with Darwin representing something of a final blow. Tyndall then presented Darwin in the mould of Copernicus and Newton. Just like the other two Darwin pondered his chief subject for decades before finally publishing, and he produced a work that could not be dis- missed, even by those naturalists who were necessarily ‘biased … by their previous education’. This was because the Origin of Species so clearly bore the signs of a disciplined and long sustained labour. ‘[T]here is one impression made by the book itself which no exposition of it, however luminous, can convey’, Tyndall continued, ‘and that is the impression of the vast amount of labour, both of observation and of thought, implied in its production’.96 Darwin could, therefore, be trusted to impart knowledge on this important and difficult subject matter, as his work gave all indication that he had the moral authority to do so. ‘He moves over the subject with the passionless strength of a glacier’, argued Tyndall. ‘But though in handling this mighty theme all passion has been stilled, there is an emotion of the intellect, incident to the discernment of new truth, which often colours and warms the pages of Mr. Darwin’.97 It seems that now Tyndall was quite happy to consider Darwin in light of his work on glaciers. And this use of a natural metaphor to describe Darwin’s character in relation to his science is reminiscent of Tyndall’s characterization of Faraday’s vast strength and perfect flexibility, which was like that of a river. Tyndall also stressed the moral framework of Darwin’s labours in order, ultimately, to justify his rather stunning claim at the end of his address that science

will wrest from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory. All schemes and systems which thus infringe upon the domain of science must, in so far as they do this, submit to its control, and relinquish all thought of controlling it.98 Because science, for Tyndall, was underpinned by deeply moral virtues that guided the modern man of science, there was no longer any justiﬁcation to limit the scientiﬁc analysis for theological reasons. This is precisely what Darwin’s careful treatment of evolution symbolized for Tyndall. Darwin made it possible for the man of science to claim for his authority the entire story of life.

95Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” 156–157. 96Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” 175–176. 97Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” 181. 98Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” 199. ANNALS OF SCIENCE 547

4. Conclusion Tyndall’s Belfast Address was extensively criticized, touching off a renewed debate about the relationship between science and religion. While it appeared to support views like those promoted by Draper, who envisioned a war between science and religion, it also appeared to confirm the worst fears of certain orthodox religious thinkers who already felt threatened by the territorial expansion of scientific naturalism.99 Tyndall’s lecture, of course, was more nuanced than these positions suggested, as the conflict he discussed was between science and theology, while the pantheism that underpinned his talk left much room for metaphysical speculations.100 However, these subtle nuances were not appreciated at the time. As Lightman has shown, after the Belfast Address, Tyndall was no longer treated in the periodical press as a disinterested party in the great debates of the day. He was now often portrayed as a radical Darwinian and materialist.101 What is less well understood with regard to the Belfast Address, however, is the central role Tyndall ascribed to Darwin in his narrative, not just with regard to his theory of evolution but more so to the persona of Darwin himself. Tyndall characterized Darwin as embodying many of the epistemic virtues of a Coperni- cus or a Newton while presenting to the world a scientific theory that was equally as transformative as those discovered by the other two. At this time, this extraordinary praise for Darwin, was duly noted and criticized. The Saturday Review, for instance, which had earlier so appreciated Tyndall’s sympathetic description of Faraday in Faraday as a Discoverer, now found Tyndall’s characterization of Darwin entirely inappropriate:

Vast as are our obligations to Mr. Darwin, and greatly as he has tended to raise the reputation of English science in the eyes of the world at large, we cannot approve of such fulsome adulation of a living man as was indulged in by Professor Tyndall in relation to him.102 John Tulloch, meanwhile, felt that Darwin would likely be embarrassed by Tyn- dall’s ‘outburst of nauseous compliment’. Darwin may be an ‘accomplished naturalist’, but he was not deserving of such ‘ridiculous praise’.103 Within the context of Tyndall’s imagined history of science, however, this was not ridiculous praise at all. Darwin had become, in Tyndall’s mind, a living

99For 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 Serial- ized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004), 199–237. 100See, 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). 101Lightman, “Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press,” 202. 102“Professor Tyndall’s Address,” 237. 103[John Tulloch], “Modern Scientific Materialism,” 528. 548 I. HESKETH

historical figure, a great man of science whose moral character made possible the creation of a science of life that transcended different scientific fields and subjects, one that could be applied to the organic and the inorganic. This was a view of scientific progress that had begun forming in Tyndall’s mind early in his intellectual development, as he integrated Carlyle’s hero worship with his reading and teaching of scientific biographies. When Tyndall claimed that Carlyle would have appreciated the theme of the ‘Hero as Man of Science’,he was revealing more about himself that he was about Carlyle.104 This helps shed light on his relationship with Faraday, as well as the hagiography that was Faraday as a Discoverer. Tyndall’s delay in following his X brothers in defending Darwin is more difficult to explain. But his longstanding interest in cosmic evolution on one hand, and molecular evolution on the other, gives us some insight as to why he began speaking about Darwin and evolution when he did. Ironically, it may very well have been Darwin’s theorizing about pangenesis that made him initially worthy of worship. Examining the making of Tyn- dall’s own personal Darwinian Revolution in this way, therefore, helps us to recognize how his deeper conceptions of science as heroic biography informed – and were informed by – the more immediate contingencies of his life.

Disclosure statement

No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number FT170100194].

ORCID

Ian Hesketh http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1737-9032

104Tyndall, “Personal Recollections of Thomas Carlyle,” 28.