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Trinity College, Dublin - HL has obtained from the Provost the permission WW desired, and has transmitted to Major Temple the order conveying it: 'The gardens are in beautiful condition, and (botanically) well arranged'. His magnetical work has been confined to the task of improving the methods of observing. The next task will be to obtain empirical laws from the data. In the higher task of connecting these laws with physical principles - Gauss is likely to have the principal share. HL hopes that the recent agitation will not keep WW from the Cork BAAS meeting. Lord Rosse's 6 foot aperture speculum will then be completed.

Trinity College, Dublin - HL describes the tidal work they are conducting: 'We have two series of observations - one of the heights of each high and low water, without reference to time; and the other of both heights and times of all the spring and neap tides observed throughout the semidiurnal period, at intervals of 15 minutes'. They have a complete series for 1851. Professor Haughton [Samuel Haughton?] has undertaken to work out the results using George Airy's method. The tide gauges are self-registering as to height but not as to time.

Trinity College, Dublin - HL has forwarded WW's lectures to their Professor of Moral Philosophy: 'There has been nothing published here, in either intellectual or moral philosophy, since the time of Berkeley, I believe our present professor of Moral Philosophy (the Rev. William Butler) is the first in that Chair'. WB is a follower of the German school of metaphysics - 'hitherto we have been following the Scotch'.

Edinburgh - JDF thanks WW for all his support over the years and for his recent intervention in ensuring JDF's paper [On the Hot Springs of the Pyrenees and the Verification of Thermometers] was published in the next part of the Transactions of the Royal Society [see JDF to WW, 21 Sept. 1836]. In connection with the proceedings of the BAAS meeting at Bristol, JDF has 'got 12 Thermometers from 3 to 26 feet long, ready for the rites of sepulture'. One set are to lie in a 'warm bed of Trap' rock at the observatory, another in the 'hard cold sandstone of Craig Leith'; and a third set in the 'softly repose in a deep bed of perfectly uniform, dry, incoherent sand. How often do you think they should be observed?' JDF has subjected his magnetic observations taken at the Alps and the Pyrenees to calculation and has found a 'distinct indication of a diminution of intensity of about 1/1000 part, for 3000 feet of ascent'. Jean Baptiste Biot has written a very interesting paper about astronomical refractions. JDF hopes to apply Biot's methods to his observations with the actinometer on the extinction of light in the atmosphere. Has WW seen Lloyd's [Humphrey Lloyd] six lectures on the wave theory?: 'It seems to be done in a style much wanted as a model for English works of the kind'. JDF is really looking forward to WW's 'Opus Magnus' [The History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time, 3 vols, 1837]. What does WW think of the Metropolitan University: 'will it have any effect upon Oxford or Cambridge? If it can hurt anybody it will be our medical schools. Has Murphy [Robert Murphy] got the London College Chair. He wrote to me for a certificate which I declined on the ground of insufficient acquaintance with his department of the Pure Mathematics'.

Written from Trinity College, Dublin. One of a group of papers relating to college statutes and the University Commission.

Pitlochry, N.B. - JDF saw WW's name on the lists at the BAAS meeting at Dublin: 'I am pleased to find that you still attend occasionally'. JDF's health is not up to the 'hurry, heat, and bustle' of such meetings. He notes from Dr. Lloyd's [Humphrey Lloyd] 'most excellent address', that 'it would appear that the 'Dynamical Theory of Heat' finds much favour at Dublin. Indeed I was surprised at the approbation with which Rankine's theory of 'Molecular Vortices' [W.J.M. Rankine, 'On the Mechanical action of Heat, especially in Gases and Vapours', Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 20, 1852] was mentioned by Dr Lloyd: 'I cannot say that I ever understood it. But it appeared to me repulsive from its gratuitous assumption and interminable mathematics. I observed also that it was spoken of as an established discovery in the article on De la Rue in the Edinburgh Review'. Is JDF right that WW has unpublished 'schedules of the process of induction for other sciences than astronomy and optics which are published in your philosophy', if so can he at some stage see them.