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Far from it, they have come down, in most of the recent cases, into the scientific arena, and are meeting the men of science with their own weapons. They tell Huxley and Darwin and Tyndall that their evidence is imperfect, and their reasoning from it faulty.
First, that heat is a mode of motion was proved by Sir Humphry Davy and Count Rumford before 1820. In 1842 Joule, of Manchester, England, proved the quantitative relation between mechanical energy and heat. In 1863 note the dates Tyndall gave a course of lectures on heat as a mode of motion, and was even then sneered at by some scientific men for his temerity.
Speaking of Faraday in this connection, Professor Tyndall says: "Take him for all in all, I think it will be conceded that Michael Faraday is the greatest experimental philosopher the world has ever seen; and I will add the opinion that the progress of future research will tend not to diminish or decrease, but to enhance and glorify, the labors of this mighty investigator."
"Only chemical and physical agents influence the vital processes," says Professor Czapek, of the University of Prague, "and we need no longer take refuge in mysterious 'vital forces' when we want to explain these." Tyndall was obliged to think of a force that guided the molecules of matter into the special forms of a tree. This force was in the ultimate particles of matter.
Keeping the question in mind, however, and still taking as a postulate the conclusion of Sir John Herschel, that the spots are in some way produced by cyclones, I was led, in the course of the year following the publication of the essay, to an hypothesis which seemed more satisfactory. This, which I named at the time to Prof. Tyndall, had a point in common with the one afterward published by Prof.
There were, in fact, few phases of human life with which Froude was not familiar, from Devonshire fishermen to Cabinet Ministers. Although he knew and admired Mr. Chamberlain, his greatest political friends were Lord Carnarvon and Lord Derby, with whom he almost invariably agreed. The man of science whom, after his own brother, he knew best, was Tyndall.
To Tyndall, whose convictions were bred in Ulster and fostered by an ardent devotion to Carlyle, he wrote in the same strain, apropos of a friend's banter on their sudden division:
"And supposing the Earth to fall into the Sun?" asked the Captain. "Such a fall," answered Barbican, "according to the calculations of Tyndall and Thomson, would develop an amount of heat equal to that produced by sixteen hundred globes of burning coal, each globe equal in size to the earth itself.
"Goethe says that matter cannot exist without spirit, or spirit without matter. Would you sub-scribe to that, Mr. Hardcastle?" "Partially. Matter can exist without spirit, which you may prove by getting under an avalanche; but I do most emphatically agree that spirit cannot exist without matter. 'Divorced from matter, where is life? asks Tyndall, and nobody can answer him."
The late Professor Tyndall was both an original investigator of natural phenomena and a teacher who could make his discoveries plain to the ordinary mind as he could to the scientist working in the same field as himself. Discovering a truth in Nature or in political economies is work only half done if the discoverer wishes to make it known to those in whose interest he claims to be working.
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