In the early years of the golden age, scientific pursuits were intermixed with the sport. More often than not, the mountaineers carried a variety of instruments up the mountain with them to be used for scientific observations. The physicist John Tyndall was the most prominent of the scientists. Among the non-scientist mountaineers, the literary critic Leslie Stephen was the most prominent. In the later years of the golden age, the non-scientist pure sportsmen came to dominate the London-based Alpine Club and alpine mountaineering overall.