Professor Tyndall was not only an enterprising investigator,. he was
one of the most enterprising mountaineers of his day. Mr. W. M. Conway gives an interesting account of this side of the Professor in the Westminster Gazette of Thursday. Not nnfrequently he would scale a difficult mountain alone, and without a guide. He climbed Monte Rosa in this fashion. And even when accompanied by guides, he would stray away from the party and incur great risks at a distance from them. Though he preached the folly of lonely mountaineering to others, he could not resist the temptation of the same rash- ness himself; and it is evident that he carried something of the same audacity into his metaphysical theorising, and sometimes attempted short cuts to truth that were not only unfortunate, but, on the whole, misleading. His physique was well adapted for the most venturesome climbing, nor was his imagination at all less daring and eager in its mental and moral feats. But much as nerve and audacity will do to surmount peril in physical adventures, they are not qualities well fitted to aid the imagination in mastering truth in relation to such subjects as the nature of the connection between mind and matter. There what you want is patience, coolness, and a keen eye for the various effects of various eauses. Professor Tyndall's confident surmise that all the potencies of the human mind were implicitly contained in the various forms of earthly matter, was merely an attempt to spring across a chasm over which there was no rammer of bridge.
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