218 Scientific Labors and Character of 
Sir Humphry Davy was born December 17th, 1779, at Pen- 
zance, in Cornwall. Although his family is represented as some- 
what above the middle rank, yet his father’s estate had been so much 
reduced as to afford him little or no prospect of a patrimony ;* but at 
the age of sixteen, when his father died, he was thrown upon the 
world, like many others who have risen to the highest eminence, with 
no resources but such as he could create for himself by the efforts of 
his own mind. 
Of his early years, we are furnished with the following particu- 
s. “ He was always considered as a distinguished boy ; and there 
- are many natives of Penzance, who remember his poems and verses 
Written at the early age of nine years.} At that period his mind 
seems to have received a bias in favor of poetry, which he continued 
to cultivate until his fifteenth year, when he became the pupil of Dr. 
Borlase, of Penzance, a very ingenious surgeon and accomplished 
man, intending to prepare himself for graduating as a physician at 
Edinburgh. Conscious of uncommon powers, and resolved to at- 
tempt a nobler career than circumstances appeared to promise, oF 
his friends could expect, Mr. Davy laid down for himself a plan of 
education which embraced the circle of the sciences. By his 
eighteenth year, he had acquired the rudiments of botany, anatomy 
and physiology, the simpler mathematics, metaphysics, natural phi- 
losophy and chemistry. But chemistry soon arrested his whole at- 
tention, for he at once saw that this science offered the best unex- 
plored field for the exertion of talent.{” 
To begin the study of chemistry was, for a genius so inventive as 
his, to begin the career of discovery ; and, accordingly, his first ex- 
periments bore the impress of originality. He proved, by the exam- 
ination of sea-weed, that marine plants exert the same influence upon 
the air contained in the water of the ocean, as land vegetables exert 
n the atmosphere. We recognize in this tendency of a mind to 
‘strike out new lights in science, its likeness to such master spirits aS 
Bacon and Newton and Leibnitz, whose originality did not wait un- 
ail.they had explored every dark corner of the sciences to whieh 
they severally devoted themselves, but begun to display itself almost 
* Monthly Mag. 1.377. 
tItis stated in “The Artisan,” that several of these effusions, written Davy 
“Was ten years of age, were published in the periodicals of the time, and were much 
oe a | "Monthly Mag. 1. 378. 
