136 Analysis of Scientific Books. 



which, in our former critique vre pointed out, relative to the 

 energy of the pile, which he very ignorantly says, '* at least, 

 as far as chemical phenomena are concerned, increases in pro- 

 portion to the size of the pieces." 



All the world, at least all who take any interest in science, 

 have heard of the electro-chemical researches of Sir H. Davy, 

 in admiration of which, the National Institute of France decreed^ 

 him the Napoleon prize during the hottest period of Buona- 

 parte's hostility against England. Yet, to these magnificent 

 researches, from which a brilliant train of marvellous discove- 

 ries have sprung. Dr. Thomson allots only one-third of a page, 

 in a voluminous collection of 2600 pages, in which he bestows 

 from nine to ten on the fire-phantoms of Stahl and Brugnatelli. 

 It is not merely of omitting the most beautiful investigations of 

 modern times, that his readers have to complain. The little he 

 does say is evidently distorted. " Sir H. Davy," says the 

 Doctor, " took up the subject where Berzelius and Hisinger 

 laid it down; his celebrated dissertation, for which Buona- 

 parte's galvanic prize was awarded to him, contains merely 

 a verification of the law discovered by Berzelius and Hisinger*." 

 The National Institute of France must have been equally 

 stupid, prodigal, and unjust, to bestow, in 1807, on a native 

 of England, against which their despotic master was waging 

 a furious warfare, the Imperial prize for a discovery, which 

 two natives of Sweden, iheir ally and friend, had previously 

 made. Nor can it be said that the Institute was ignorant of 

 these Swedish researches, for a detail of them is inserted in 

 the Annates de Chimie for 1803, a work conducted by some of 

 its leading members f- We do not wish to undervalue these 

 galvanic experiments (Experiences Galvaniques) of M. M. Hi- 

 singer and Berzelius ; Sir H. Davy has, indeed, himself allowed 

 them their full merit, in his first Bakerian Lecture ; but the dis- 

 coveries of the English philosopher are evidently the spontaneous 

 growth of his own mind, and are not, in any respect, traceable to 

 the Swedish chemists, whose memoir, however ingenious, had 

 been so little regarded as not even to be translated, in the space of 

 three years, from the French into the English Journals, though 

 every other galvanic inquiry of the least note had been speedily 

 imported from the continent. The former differ from the latter, 

 just as the systematic investigations of Newtoil on the laws of 

 gravitation, differ from the prior suggestions of Galileo, Kepler, 

 and Hooke, on the laws of reciprocal attraction ; Hisinger and 



* System, vol. I. p. 171. 

 f The following are the editors named on the title-page of the above 

 volume: Les Cit.Guyton, Monge, BerthoUet, Fourcroy, Adet, Hassenfratz, 

 Sefuin, Vauquelin, C. A. Prieur, Chaptal, Parmentier, Dey, Bouillon 

 Lagrange, et (toilet Desrotils. 



