Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/843

Rh measured, generosity is great in proportion to the amount of self-denial entailed; and where ample means are possessed large gifts often entail no self-denial. Far more self-denial may be involved in the performance, on another's behalf, of some act which requires time and labor. In addition to generosity under its ordinary form, which Prof. Tyndall displayed in unusual degree, he displayed it under a less common form. He was ready to take much trouble to help friends. I have had personal experience of this. Though he had always in hand some investigation of great interest to him, and though, as I have heard him say, when he had bent his mind to a subject he could not with any facility break off and resume it again, yet, when I have sought his scientific aid—information or critical opinion—I never found the slightest reluctance to give me his undivided attention. Much more markedly, however, was this kind of generosity shown in another direction. Many men, while they are eager for appreciation, manifest little or no appreciation of others, and still less go out of their way to express it. With Tyndall it was not thus: he was eager to recognize achievement. Notably in the case of Faraday, and less notably, though still conspicuously, in many cases, he has bestowed much labor and sacrificed many weeks in setting forth others' merits. It was evidently a pleasure to him to dilate on the claims of fellow-workers.

But there was a derivative form of this generosity calling for still greater eulogy. He was not content with expressing appreciation of those whose merits were recognized, but he spent energy unsparingly in drawing public attention to those whose merits were unrecognized; and time after time, in championing the causes of such, he was regardless of the antagonisms he aroused and the evils he brought on himself. This chivalrous defense of the neglected and the ill-used has been, I think, by few, if any, so often repeated. I have myself more than once benefited by his determination, quite spontaneously shown, that justice should be done in the apportionment of credit; and I have with admiration watched like actions of his in other cases cases—in which no consideration of nationality or of creed interfered in the least with his insistanceinsistence [sic] on equitable distribution of honors.

In thus undertaking to fight for those who were unfairly dealt with, he displayed in another direction that very conspicuous trait which, as displayed in his Alpine feats, has made him to many persons chiefly known—I mean courage, passing very often into daring. And here let me, in closing this sketch, indicate certain mischiefs which this trait brought upon him. Courage grows by success. The demonstrated ability to deal with dangers produces readiness to meet more dangers, and is self-justifying where the muscular power and the nerve habitually prove adequate. But the