any such experiment is wanting. His dress was of the oldest fashion, a greyish green coat and waistcoat, with flaps, a small cocked hat, and his hair dressed like a wig (which possibly it was) with a thick clubbed tail. His walk was quick and uneasy; of course he never appeared in London unless lying back in the corner of his carriage. He probably uttered fewer words in the course of his life than any man who ever lived to fourscore years, not at all excepting the monks of La Trappe.

Mr. Cavendish died on the 10th of March, 1810, after a short illness, probably the first as well as the last under which he ever suffered. His habit of curious observation continued to the end. He was desirous of marking the progress of disease, and the gradual extinction of the vital powers. With this view, that he might not be disturbed he desired to be left alone. His servant returning sooner than he had wished was ordered again to leave the chamber of death, and when he came back a second time he found his master had expired.

DAVY.

SIR HUMPHRY DAVY being now removed beyond the reach of such feelings, as he ought always to have been above their influence, that may be said without offence of which he so disliked the mention: he had the honour of raising himself to the highest place among the chemical philosophers of the age; emerging by his merit alone from an obscure condition. His father was a carver in wood at Penzance, in Cornwall; a man of some ingenuity in his craft. He possessed a small landed property in the village of Varfell, near Penzance, and Davy was born there in 1778. He received the rudiments of his education at a school in Truro, but was very early apprenticed to an apothecary at Penzance, where, disliking the profession to which he had been destined, he occupied himself with chemical experiments, ingeniously contriving to make the utensils of the shop and the kitchen serve for apparatus; and it is remembered of him that he frequently alarmed the household by his explosions. The result of his dislike to the shop was a disagreement with his master, and he went to another in the same place; but here he continued in the same course. Pursuing a plan of study which he had laid down for himself, he became thoroughly acquainted with chemistry, and well versed in other branches of natural philosophy, beside making some proficiency in geometry; but he never cultivated the mathematical sciences, except that I recollect his telling me once, late in life, of his intention to resume the study of them, as he had begun to make progress in crystallo

graphy. He does not appear to have given any early indications of superior genius, or even of unusual quickness; but he showed all along, in following the bent of his intellectual taste, the perseverance, the firm purpose, which is inseparable from a capacity of the higher order, and is an indispensable condition, as it is a sure pledge, of success in every pursuit.

It must be observed of the biographers both of Davy and Scheele, that they seem to have made too much of the difficulties interposed in the path of their early studies by the want of apparatus, to which want, and to their ingenious contrivances for finding substitutes, a good deal of their experimental skill has been ascribed. It should be recollected that an apothecary's shop is not by any means so destitute of helps, especially for the study of chemistry, as a workshop of almost any other description. Crucibles, phials, mortars, gallipots, scales and weights, liquid measures, acids, alkalis, and neutral salts, are all to be found there, even if a furnace and still be not a necessary appendage. It may be allowed that nothing like an air-pump might be there expected, unless cupping chanced to be performed by the druggist. Accordingly Davy was glad to obtain, in a case of surgical instruments from a practitioner on board a French vessel wrecked on the Cornish coast, to whom he had done some kind service, the means of making some approximation to an exhausting engine.

It happened, fortunately for him, that Gregory Watt, youngest son of the great engineer, and whom, having had the happiness of knowing him, I have already mentioned, came to reside in the house of Davy's mother at Penzance, where he was ordered to pass the winter for the benefit of his health. Being five years older than the young chemist, and eminently accomplished both in science and in letters, his conversation and advice was a great advantage, of which Davy gladly availed himself. Another accident threw

him in the way of Mr. Davies Giddy, a cultivator of natural as well as mathematical science, and he, finding that Davy had been devoting himself to chemistry, gave him the use of an excellent library, and introduced him to Dr. Beddoes, who was then engaged in forming an establishment called by him the Pneumatic Institution, for the medical use of gases, as well as for further investigating their properties. At the head of this he placed his new friend, who was thus at once enabled to pursue his scientific vocation as a profession, and did not long delay giving to the world a proof of his ingenuity, by the publication of a theory of 'Light and Heat,' fanciful no doubt, and ill-digested, containing much groundless and imaginary, and even absurd speculation, but disclosing great information and no inconsiderable cleverness. It was published in a periodical work edited by Dr. Beddoes, called 'Contributions to Medical and Physical Science;' and to the same work he soon after gave a paper upon the 'Nitrous Oxide,' on the respiration of which he had made some very curious experiments. The singular circumstances which he thus ascertained, gave him considerable reputation as an experimentalist, and he was soon after (1802) chosen first Assistant Lecturer in Chemistry, by the Royal Institution of London, and the year following, sole Chemical Professor. Nor must the boldness which he had shown in conducting his experiments be passed over. He had exposed himself to serious hazard in breathing some most deleterious gases, and both in his trials of gaseous mixtures, and in his galvanic processes, he had made many narrow escapes from the danger of violent explosions.

It is a singular fact that, although his attention had never been confined to his favourite science, for he had studied literature, and especially poetry to the extent of writing tolerable verses, yet he was of so uncouth an exterior and manners, notwithstanding an exceedingly handsome and expressive countenance,

that Count Rumford, a leading director of the Institution, on seeing him for the first time, expressed no little disappointment, even regretting the part he had taken in promoting the engagement. But these feelings were of short duration. Davy was soon sufficiently humanized, and even refined, to appear before a London and a fashionable audience of both sexes with great advantage, and his first course of lectures had unbounded and unparalleled success. This he owed, certainly, to the more superficial accomplishments of good and lively language, an agreeable delivery, and, above all, an ingenuous enthusiasm for his subject which informed and quickened his whole discourse. But the fame which he thus acquired would have been of limited extent and of short duration, had his reliance only been upon the fickle multitude whom such qualities can please. The first consequences of his success in the line of mere exhibition were unfavourable, and threatened to be fatal; for he was led away by the plaudits of fashion, and must needs join in its frothy, feeble current. For a while he is remarked to have shown the incongruous combination of science and fashion, which form a most imperfect union, and produce a compound of no valuable qualities, somewhat resembling the nitrous gas on which he experimented earlier in life, having an intoxicating effect on the party tasting it, and a ludicrous one on all beholders. They who have recorded this transformation, while they lament the substitution of anything for "the natural candour and warmth of feeling which had singularly won upon the acquaintance of his early life," add most justly that the weakness which they describe never "cooled his regard for his family and former friends." I can vouch for the change, which was merely superficial, being of very short duration; and it is pleasing to add that, even while it lasted, there was none of that most offensive of all the effects produced by such a transition state to be found in his conversation; he