Abstract
I AM very glad I wrote to you putting my questions to Prof. Tyndall. It has drawn from him a letter, full of all sorts of hints and prophecies and information and pleasant observations on details with which I had not thought of troubling him; and there is even a delicate bit of flattery for poor me, of whom the Professor knows nothing. It is really quite a gem of a letter, a beautiful example of that “tour piquant” referred to by M. Pasteur, which the Professor gives to everything he touches, and which we at home know how, to value as well as any Frenchman. There is only one fault in it, and that is that the Professor, in the exuberance of his kindness, has unfortunately forgotten to answer my modest questions. But why does he liken himself to Horatius, and talk of enemies yet to be dealt with? Horatius did not sing his paean before going into battle. And how can Prof. Tyndall have any enemies? I thought that scientific investigators were all brothers, I regarded Prof. Tyndall as a brother keeping a bright look out due north, and Dr. Bastian as a brother with his eye firmly set towards the south, while Dr. Sanderson seemed to me to be a remarkably silent brother gazing somewhere about sou'-sou'-west-and-by-south-a-quarter-south.
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INQUIRER Prof. Tyndall on Germs. Nature 13, 347 (1876). https://doi.org/10.1038/013347a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/013347a0
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