Item 95 - James David Forbes to William Whewell

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Phesdo by Laurencekirk, N.B. - After he left Kissingen [see JDF to WW, 19 June 1850] he went to Switzerland. He saw Studer, von Buck and Charpentier, and had two 'capital days' of glacier walking. On his return to Edinburgh he was seized 'with a painful sort of bilious attack, which confined me to bed for 2 days'. The BAAS meeting was thus an uphill struggle although he managed to enjoy the last few days: 'on the whole I observed a good deal of surrender of personal feeling to the general cause of harmony on the occasion'. JDF gave another version of his paper on the application of probabilities to double stars ['On the Alleged Evidence for a Physical Connexion between Stars forming Binary or Multiple Groups, arising from their Proximity Alone', London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, August 1849]: 'Mature consideration and conversation with others has satisfied me completely, that Mitchell's famous reasoning about double stars, the Pleiades etc - so far as founded on the calculation of probabilities is utterly baseless. Herschel has written a review in the Edinburgh (last no.) in which at page 34 (I think) he tries to answer my objections, but in fact gives the real question at issue the go by altogether' [see JDF to WW, 20 Oct. 1849].