Michael D. Barton, Janet Browne, Ken Corbett and Norman McMillan (eds.), The Correspondence of John Tyndall, vol. 6: The Correspondence, November 1856–February 1859. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. Pp. lviii + 537. ISBN 978-0-8229-4533-8. $125.00. (hardback).

Abstract

The editing (shared between four scholars from Canada, the USA, England and Ireland for greater speed of production) is meticulous and helpful in dating undated letters and identifying people and places, publications, literary references and any scientific concepts or experiments discussed in the letters The editors occasionally nod, as when Mrs Louisa Tyndall's transcription of letter 1401 by Mrs Juliet Pollock is printed as referring to a ‘Mrs Crosser's Memorial of her Husband’ instead of to Cornelia Crosse's biography of her electrician husband;and no man of science, let alone Edwin Lankester, was president of the British Association for twenty-five years (letter 1488), whatever Wikipedia may say Because the Royal Institution has been celebrating the bicentennial of Tyndall's birth this year (2020) in COVID-muted form, it is interesting to find further confirmation in one of Tyndall's own letters (item 1366) that he was probably born in 1822, not 1820 The other topics highlighted by the editors’ Introduction provide context for Tyndall's professional activities as a lecturer at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street and the London Institution in the City of London's Finsbury Square, his activities as an examiner for the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and his continuing friendship with French and German scientists whom he had met and worked with as a mature student between 1848 and 1851