Tyndall proposed that one hundred clergymen be delegated to pray for the patients in any certain ward of Bellevue Hospital. If, after a year's trial, there was a marked decrease in mortality in that ward, as compared with previous records, we might then conclude that prayer was efficacious, otherwise not.
One good clergyman in Pittsburgh offered publicly to debate "Darwinism" with Tyndall, but beyond a little scattered shrapnel of this sort, the lecture-tour was a great success. It netted just thirteen thousand dollars, the whole amount of which Tyndall generously donated as a fund to be used for the advancement of natural science in America.
In Eighteen Hundred Eighty-five, this fund had increased to thirty-two thousand dollars, and was divided into three equal parts and presented to Columbia, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. The fund was still further increased by others who followed Professor Tyndall's example, and Columbia, from her share of the Tyndall fund, I am told now supports two foreign scholarships for the benefit of students who show a special aptitude in scientific research. Professor James of Harvard once said: "The impetus to popular scientific study caused by Professor Tyndall's lectures in the United States was most helpful and fortunate. Speaking but for myself, I know I am a different man and a better man, for having heard and known John Tyndall."
hen John Tyndall died, in the year Eighteen Hundred Ninety-three, Spencer wrote:
"It never occurred to Tyndall to ask what it was politic to say, but simply to ask what was true. The like has of late years been shown in his utterances concerning political matters—shown, it may be, with too great frankness. This extreme frankness was displayed also in private, and sometimes, perhaps, too much displayed; but every one must have the defects of his qualities. Where absolute sincerity exists, it is certain now and then to cause an expression of a feeling or opinion not adequately restrained.
"But the contrast in genuineness between him and the average citizen was very conspicuous. In a community of Tyndalls (to make a rather wild supposition), there would be none of that flabbiness characterizing current thought and action—no throwing overboard of principles elaborated by painful experience in the past, and adoption of a hand-to-mouth policy unguided by any principle. He was not the kind of man who would have voted for a bill or a clause which he secretly believed would be injurious, out of what is euphemistically called 'party loyalty,' or would have endeavored to bribe each section of the electorate by 'ad captandum' measures, or would have hesitated to protect life and property for fear of losing votes. What he saw right to do he would have done, regardless of proximate consequences.
"The ordinary tests of generosity are very defective. As rightly measured, generosity is great in proportion to the amount of self-denial entailed; and where ample means are possessed, large gifts often entail no self-denial. Far more self-denial may be involved in the performance, on another's behalf, of some act that requires time and labor. In addition to generosity under its ordinary form, which Professor Tyndall displayed in unusual degree, he displayed it under a less common form.
"He was ready to take much trouble to help friends. I have had personal experience of this. Though he had always in hand some investigation of great interest to him, and though, as I have heard him say, when he bent his mind to the subject he could not with any facility break off and resume it again, yet, when I have sought scientific aid, information or critical opinion, I never found the slightest reluctance to give me his undivided attention. Much more markedly, however, was this kind of generosity shown in another direction. Many men, while they are eager for appreciation, manifest little or no appreciation of others, and still less go out of their way to express it.
"With Tyndall it was not thus; he was eager to recognize achievement. Notably in the case of Michael Faraday, and less notably, though still conspicuously in many cases, he has bestowed much labor and sacrificed many weeks in setting forth the merits of others. It was evidently a pleasure to him to dilate on the claims of fellow workers.