Footnote 8, Chapter 11, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
indicates a link to material not in the original print version. [GPL]. In a memoir published in 1884, a friend quotes some of Ruskin's opinions on modern scientists: "As regards my opinion of Tyndall, I admire his splendid courage (I am a dreadful physical coward myself...), and his schoolboy love of adventure..., naive to a degree incurably so; but he has never felt himself to be a sinner against science in the least because of his all-overwhelming vanity. His conduct to James Forbes... was the outcome of the schoolboy feeling when he sees the Alps for the first time: 'Good gracious! no one ever saw this before; and I can tell the world all about it as no one ever did before!'.... But before long people will find that this theory was all decided before this conceited, careless schoolboy was born. And that is why I always attack him, and shall continue to do so until I die" (XXXVI, xln). The attack seems to echo Ruskin's distaste for his own "snappish young-mannishness" thirty years earlier. I have studied the glacier controversy at greater length, focusing on the scientific issues at stake and on Tyndall's career and reputation as a whole, in "Ruskin and Tyndall: The Poetry of Matter and the Poetry of Spirit," in Paradis and Postlewait, pp. 217-246. Interestingly, Forbes's view has since prevailed over Tyndall's as the result of later "applications of thermodynamic principles to continuous deformation under stress," although Forbes's formulations were indeed somewhat vague, given the limitations of his measurements. See Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1976), XIII, S.V. "Tyndall."
Last modified December 2000