Item 33 - James David Forbes to William Whewell

Edinburgh - JDF spent the whole summer in Germany and only returned to Edinburgh ten days ago. Thanks WW for copies of his book on Education and the Mechanical Euclid: 'I cannot but hope that your book on universities will not be without use. I enter most cordially respecting German Universities. In fact not one who has not examined them can have an idea of the quantity of pure humbug and inefficiency which they contain, and yet we are doomed to have them perpetually cast in our teeth as models of perfection'. JDF saw the article in the Edinburgh Review of WW's work 'with much more regret than surprise' [David Brewster's review of WW's 'History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Times', Edinburgh Review, 1837]. JDF has heard nothing on the BAAS meeting in Liverpool: 'I should like to know from you how the scientific spirit of the thing was preserved'. Has WW any news on George Airy and the magnetic observatory? Gauss [Karl Friedrich Gauss] has published an interesting book of the results of the magnetic simultaneous observations: 'He is an odd and rather disagreeable man: inclosed in an impenetrable casing of self satisfaction...Very different is Encke [J. F. Encke] at Berlin, one of the most agreeable as well as striking men I have met with'. Compared to the English meeting [BAAS], the German meeting 'is now a very trifling matter'. JDF met Von Buck and has been studying his Dolomite theory in the Eiffel and in the South Tyrol. He looks forward to WW's philosophy of induction and hopes 'it will contain the Tabular views which I recollect to have got a glimpse of and which I was disappointed not to find in your volumes'.