Item 24 - Letter from John Herschel

3 pp

Feldhausen near Wynberg - JH is sorry to hear of the dissension at Cambridge concerning management and discipline: 'I read your pamphlet on College discipline - nothing surely could be more temperate and apparently more reasonable' [Remarks on Some Parts of Mr Thirlwall's Two Letters on the Admission of Dissenters to Academical Degrees, 1834]. Maclear has been trying to set up tidometers at Simon's Bay and the Cape Town Jetty. JH has sent WW's paper on cotidal lines to Lloyd of Mauritius with a request to observe tides there ['Essay Towards a First Approximation to a Map of Cotidal Lines', Phil. Trans, 123, 1833]. They have made JH President of a Literary and Philosophical Society at Cape Town: 'I mean to get organised if possible working Committees, chiefly to collect data for other people to combine (for we have no thinkers among us - yet)'. JH gives his analysis of the Cape climate. He has very successfully repolished his two telescope mirrors: 'in one of our superb nights (after the rain) 800 was my working power - 1200 a good power and 2000 was borne and gave round disks to Mars!!'