Life of Sir Humphry Davy. 357 



might teach the application of science to the advancement of the 

 arts of life, advance the taste, and science of the country, and improve 

 the means of industry and domestic comfort among the poor. These 

 benevolent designs were to be promoted by committees for the pur- 

 pose, having for their object the advancement, by scientific investi- 

 gation, of the arts of life, on which the subsistence of all, and the 

 comfort of the great majority of mankind, absolutely depend. ' At 

 this early period of its history,' says Dr. Paris, * the Royal Institution 

 presented a scene of the most animated bustle and exhilarating acti- 

 vity. It was " like a busy ant-hill in a calm sunshine."' 



At the commencement of 1805, Davy enriched the cabinets of the 

 Institution by a present of minerals, which were reported to be of the 

 value of 100 guineas ; and he was soon after, in addition to his 

 professorship, appointed director of the laboratory ; by which ap- 

 pointment, his annual income from the Institution was raised to four 

 hundred guineas. At this period he delivered a series of lectures on 

 Geology, and produced his paper, published in the Philosophical 

 Transactions, ' Analytical Experiments on a Mineral Production from 

 Derbyshire (Wavellite), consisting principally of Alumina and Water;' 

 and soon after he communicated to the same body a paper * On the 

 Method of analyzing Stones containing a fixed Alkali, by means of 

 the Boracic Acid/ which is said to have much advanced the art of 

 mineral analysis. On the death of Dr. Gray, Davy was elected secre- 

 tary of the Royal Society, at an extraordinary meeting on the 22d 

 Jan. 1807, being at the same time elected a member of the council. 



In Chapter VI. of his work, Dr. Paris enters upon that brilliant 

 period in the life of Davy, ' at which he effected those grand disco- 

 veries in science, embracing the development of the laws of voltaic 

 electricity, which will transmit his name to posterity ;' prefixed we 

 have a brief view of the history of galvanism, or voltaic electricity, 

 divided into six grand epochs. Davy, in his Bakerian lecture of 

 1806, remarks 



' That the true origin of all that has been done in this department of phi- 

 losophy was the accidental discovery, by Nicholson and Carlisle, of the 

 decomposition of water by the pile of Volta, in April, 1800, which was 

 immediately followed by that of the decomposition of certain metallic 

 solutions, and by the observation of the separation of an alkali on the 

 negative plates of the apparatus. Mr. Cruikshank, in pursuing these 

 experiments, obtained many new and important results, such as the 

 decomposition of Ihe muriates of magnesia, soda, and ammonia; and 

 also observed the fact that the alkalitie matter always appeared at the 

 negative, and acid matter at the positive pole/ 



' In September, 1800, Davy published his first paper on the subject of 

 galvanic electricity, in Nicholson's Journal, which was followed by six 

 others, in which he so far extended the original experiment of Nicholson 

 and Carlisle, as to show that oxygen and hydrogen might be evolved 

 from separate portions of water, though vegetable and even animal sub- 

 stances intervened ; and conceiving that all decompositions might be polar, 

 he electrised different compounds at the different extremities, and found 

 that sulphur and metallic bodies appeared at the negative pole, and oxy- 

 gen and azote at the positive pole, though the bodies furnishing them 

 were separated from each other. Here was. the dawn of the electro- 



