Abstract
WE are glad to be able to announce that a complimentary dinner is to be given to Prof. Tyndall on the occasion of his retirement from the Chair of Physics in the Royal Institution. Prof. Tyndall has still before him, we hope, many a long year of fruitful research, but it would have been strange if the present opportunity had been allowed to pass without an adequate expression of the gratitude which is felt by large classes of his countrymen for the services he has already rendered to science. His great reputation he has won by severe and long-continued labour, the value of which is most highly estimated by those who are most capable of forming a judgment on its worth. Prof. Tyndall has not only made additions to the sum of human knowledge; he has done much to aid the process by which the English public are acquiring a new conception of the place that properly belongs to science in modern life, and of the need for applying scientific method to departments of thought and work from which it has hitherto been too often rigidly excluded. Moreover, by his popular expositions of the results of inquiry in various branches of physics, he has shown that science, so far from being in any sense hostile to literature, can receive full justice only when it is handled by writers who are masters of literary expression. The books in which Prof. Tyndall has appealed to the general public have marked an era in the intellectual development of many of his readers, and his works will always serve to remind men of science of the possibility of presenting profound and accurate thought in luminous and attractive forms.
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Complimentary Dinner to Professor Tyndall . Nature 36, 133–134 (1887). https://doi.org/10.1038/036133a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/036133a0