Transcribed from the 1889 Cassell & Company edition by DavidPrice, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
BY SIR HUMPHRY DAVY, Bart.,
Late President of the Royal Society.
CASSELL & COMPANY, limited:
LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK & MELBOURNE. 1889
Humphry Davy was born at Penzance, in Cornwall, on the 17th of December,1778, and died at Geneva on the 29th of May, 1829, at the age of fifty. He was a philosopher who turned knowledge to wisdom; he was one of theforemost of our English men of science; and this book, written whenhe was dying, which makes Reason the companion of Faith, shows how hepassed through the light of earth into the light of heaven.
His father had a small patrimony at Varfell, in Ludgvan. Hismother had lost in early childhood both her parents within a few hoursof each other, and had been adopted by John Tonkin, an eminent surgeonin Penzance, to whom, therefore, so to speak, Humphry Davy became grandsonby adoption. There were five such grandchildren—Humphry,the elder of two boys, the other boy being named John, and three girls.
At a preparatory school and at the Penzance Grammar School HumphryDavy was a noticeable boy. He read eagerly and showed great quicknessof imagination, delighted in legends, when eight years old told storiesto his companions, and as a boy wrote verse. There was a Quakersaddler who made for himself an electrical machine and mechanical models,in which young Davy took keen interest, and from that saddler, RobertDunkin, came the first impulse towards experiments in science. At fifteen Davy was placed for further education at a school in Truro. A year later his father died, and John Tonkin apprenticed him, on the10th of February, 1795, to Dr. Borlase, a surgeon in large practiceat Penzance. Medical practitioners in those days dispensed theirown medicines, and the inquiring mind of this young apprentice beinglet loose upon a store-room of chemicals, experimental chemistry becamehis favourite pursuit. His grandfather, by adoption, allowed himto fit up a garret as a laboratory, notwithstanding p. 6thefears of the household that “This boy, Humphry, will blow us allinto the air.”
Activity and originality of mind, with a persistent habit of inquiryand experiment, brought Davy friends who could appreciate and help him. When Dr. Beddoes, of Bristol, was examining the Cornish coast, in 1798,he came upon young Humphry Davy, was told of researches made by him,and urged to engage him as laboratory assistant in a Pneumatic Institutionthat he was then establishing in Bristol. Davy went in October,1798, then in his twentieth year; but his good friend, and grandfatherby adoption, had set his heart upon Humphry’s becoming an eminentburgeon, and even altered his will when his boy yielded to the temptationof a laboratory for research. Men also know something of the troubleof the hen who has a chance duckling in her brood, and sees that contumaciouschicken run into the water deaf to all the warnings of her love.
At Bristol Humphry Davy came into companionship with Coleridge andSouthey, who were then also at the outset of their career, and thereare poems of his in the Poetical Anthology then published by Southey. But at the same time Davy contributed papers on “Heat, Light,and the Combinations of Light,” on “Phos-Oxygen and itsCombinations,” and on “The Theory of Respiration,”to a volume of West Country Collections, that filled more than halfthe volume. He was experimenting then on gases and on galvanism,and one day by e