4 Professor T. E. Thorpe [Jan. 17, 



of the voltaic battery and for its immediate application by Nicholson 

 and Carlisle in this country to the electrolytic decomposition of water. 



Davy himself has said, " The voltaic i3attery was an alarm bell to 

 experimenters in every part of Europe ; and it served no less for 

 demonstrating new properties in electricity, and for establishing the 

 laws of this science, than as an instrument of discovery in other 

 branches of knowledge ; exhibiting relations between subjects before 

 apparently without connection, and serving as abend of unity betAveen 

 chemical and physical philosophy." 



We owe it to Sir Joseph Banks that Yolta's great discovery was 

 first made known to English men of science, and the study of the 

 phenomena of Galvanic Electricity was at once entered upon by a 

 score of experimenters in this country. Among them was Davy. 

 Even before he left Bristol he was hard at work on the subject, 

 sending the results of his observations to Nicholson's Journal in a 

 series of short papers. He resumed his inquiries immediately on his 

 arrival in London, and was doubtless well prepared, therefore, for his 

 opening course of lectures. 



In 1801 he sent his first communication to the Royal Society on 

 " An Account of Some Galvanic Combinations Formed by ^ the 

 Arrangement of Single Metallic Plates and Fluids, Analogous to the 

 NcAv (ialvanic Ajjparatus of Mr. Yolta." Although the work was con- 

 tinually interrupted by requests made to him l)y the Managers to 

 carry out their own ideas of facilitating the means of procuring the 

 comforts and conveniences of life, he never lost sight of the subject 

 of voltaic electricity, and in spite of innumeral)le distractions due to 

 the precarious position of the Institution, he gradually accumulated 

 the material, out of which grew his first Bakerian Lecture " On Some 

 Chemical Agencies of Electricity," read before the Royal Society on 

 November 2oth, 1806. I have ventured elsewhere to express my 

 opinion of this paper. In my judgment it constitutes, in reality, 

 Davy's greatest claim as a philosopher to our admiration and grati- 

 tude, for in it he, for the first time, succeeded in unravelling the 

 fundamental laws of electro-chemistry, and thereby imported a" new 

 order of conceptions, altogether unlocked for and undreamt of, into 

 science. 



I am only at the moment concerned with this memoir in its re- 

 ktion to the discovery of which to-night we celebrate the centenary. 

 The isolation of the metals of the alkalis was unquestionably an 

 achievement of the highest brilliancy, and as such appeals strongly 

 to the popular imagination. But it was only the necessary and con- 

 sequential link in a chain of discovery which, bad Davy neglected to 

 make it, would have been immediately forged by another. 



The publication of Davy's first "^ Bakerian Lecture produced a 

 great sensation, both at home and abroad. Berzelius, years after- 

 wards, spoke of it as one of the most remarkable memoirs that had 

 ever enriched the theory of chemistry. Very significant, too, of the 



