(317 ) 



The Life of Sir Humphry Davy, Bart., LL,D. t laic President of 

 the Royal Society, fyc. $c. #c. By John Ayrton Paris, M.D., 

 F.R.S., &c. &c. 4to. London, 1831. 



history of science offers to our notice several remarkable 

 epochs at which the human mind has seemed to receive an ex- 

 traordinary impulse, when a train of circumstances has led to the 

 development of some supereminent genius, who, soaring beyond 

 the ken of his fellow men, by his happy discoveries in the regions 

 of truth and nature, has traced out new roads to knowledge, tending 

 to advance the progress of civilization whole ages in a few short 

 years. Such were Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Franklin, and 

 Watt. A similar period has just elapsed in the first thirty years 

 of the nineteenth century, and such a gifted being was Davy. 

 Dr. Paris has justly observed that 



'The extent of our obligations to a philosopher cannot be appreciated 

 until time shall have shown the various important purposes to which his 

 discoveries may administer. The names of Mayow and Hales might 

 have been lost in the stream of discovery, had not the results of Priestley 

 and Lavoisier shown the value and importance of their statical experi- 

 ments on the chemical relations of air to other substances. The disco- 

 veries of Dr. Black on the subject of latent heat could never have 

 obtained that celebrity they now enjoy, had not Mr. Watt availed nim- 

 self of their application for the improvement of the steam-engine ; and 

 the views of Sir H. Davy respecting the true nature of chlorine become 

 daily more important from the discovery of new elements of an analo- 

 gous nature. In future ages, the metals of the alkalies and earths may 

 admit of applications, and open new avenues of knowledge, of which at 

 present we can form no idea ; but it is obvious that, in the page of 

 history, his name will gather fame in proportion as such discoveries 

 unfold themselves. 1 



Humphry Davy was born at Penzance in Cornwall, on the 17th 

 of December, 1778. His ancestors had long possessed a small 

 estate at Varfell, in the Mounts Bay, to which his father, who had 

 been apprenticed to a carver in wood, and exercised his art with 

 considerable skill, at length succeeded. He was first placed at a 

 preparatory school kept by a Mr. Bushell, who was so struck with 

 the progress he made, that he urged his father to remove him to a 

 superior school, and Dr. Paris has shown that in his early fondness 

 for fiction, and in the power of creating imagery for the gratification 

 of his fancy, Davy greatly resembled Sir Walter Scott. At an 

 early age he was placed at the Grammar School of Penzance, under 

 the Rev. J. C. Coryton, boarding with Mr. Tonkin, an eminent 

 surgeon of that town. While at this school he wrote verses and 

 ballads, and frequently amused his young companions with fire- 

 works and thunder-powders of his own making, and other puerile 

 exhibitions of the same class, which manifested his early passion 

 for experiment. He was extremely fond of fishing, and of shooting- 

 when old enough to carry a gun, and made this last amusement 

 subservient to his love of knowledge by forming a collection of rare 



