JOHN TYNDALL
While I lived at "The Hut" I lunched daily with the Professor and Mrs. Tyndall. Professor Tyndall had been suffering for a long time from insomnia. He had discovered, he thought, in the peculiar tissue of calf's head and tripe a narcotic principle of sufficient strength to compose him for sleep. This formed the staple of his diet, and the dishes were prepared under the supervision of Mrs. Tyndall, whose devotion to her husband amounted to idolatry.
At that time an invalid, Tyndall passed the day in a dressing-gown, reclining for the greater part of it on a couch in one of the libraries. I regret that there is no record of his conversation, for he was a fluent and willing talker, eager to instruct or amuse me while I painted. He touched frequently upon belief and unbelief, and I often seemed to detect a kind of apology for his attitude of "I don't know." He was not so uncompromising in his attitude as Darwin, who, one day after a long discussion upon religion at table, rose from his chair, and throwing his long leg over the back of it and planting his foot firmly down in the seat, said to Tyndall reproachfully, "Why, I believe you still hang on to some shreds of belief!" Tyndall replied that it was not so, but that he was ready to affirm nothing: he had neither proof nor disproof of the existence of God; he simply did not know. It was at this time that the controversy on miracles between Gladstone and Huxley was at its height, and the subject was uppermost with a good many people. To my query, "Don't you think the need of a God is so strong in the mind of the race, that the mere desire itself would assume such force and volume that it would create a Providence?" He replied by quoting Napoleon's saying, "If there had not been any God, men would certainly have had to invent one."
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