Item 117 - James David Forbes to William Whewell

Edinburgh - Is it true that Robert L. Ellis has died? Ever since JDF first met him some twenty years ago in Bath, 'I have felt a lively interest, amounting to a kind of fascination' in him. If he is dead 'I hope that some one who could do him justice will write a short memorial of him'. Has WW heard anything of a 'supposed discovery by Dr Tyndall [John Tyndall] in the theory of glaciers?' From what JDF has heard, it 'consists in showing the brittleness of ice and the facility of its reintegration. Now this I thought had been proved by me to be the cause of the 'veined structure' as resulting from the partial sliding of a infinity of bruised surfaces into which the ice is split when ever the differential velocity of the glacier is considerable'.