22 A CHEMICAL TRIAD. 



countenance thin and very pale. His forehead is broad and 

 intellectual. His eyes are bright and shining, but his features 

 display no trace of sentiment or passion. He might be likened 

 to a sculptured block of marble, were it not for the radiant 

 intelligence of his eyes ; but that radiance is peculiar. It has 

 in it nothing of human sentiment. It is the light of the 

 moonbeam, cold and cheerless. Our strange individual is 

 evidently stricken in years, and his attire is that which was 

 fashionable in his youth. Pel-ukes even in 1810 were not 

 quite unknown, but the peruke of our strange philosopher is 

 of very antique shape. Its curls are very tight, and the queue 

 is of the obsolete form known as the 6 knocker pattern.' His 

 wrists are enveloped in lace ruffles, and he wears a frill of 

 similar material. His coat is of velvet. Its colour was ori- 

 ginally violet, but tune and use have faded it down into a 

 sober neutral tint. Its cut is antique, but we are familiarised 

 with it in the court-dress of the present day. 



Thus much for the appearance of our illustrious stranger, 

 for he is indeed such illustrious even in the sense of heraldry, 

 coming as he does of one of our most noble families. He is the 

 grandson of a duke. He is celebrated, too, in another sense. 

 The Honourable Henry Cavendish is one of England's most 

 renowned philosophers : great as a chemist, great as a mathe- 

 matician, great as an astronomer. No science was too ex- 

 pansive for the grasp of that master-mind, none too minute 

 for the limit of its scrutiny. To weigh the earth, to unveil 

 the mysteries of the stars, to solve the most complex lunar 

 problems these were the occupations of him we look upon. 

 Henry Cavendish seems to have been born for the purpose of 

 demonstrating the power of the human mind as a calculating 

 machine, and of proving how little the possession of that 

 power implies the coexistence of those sympathies which 

 ennoble human life, rendering man, when he rightly directs 

 them, that which poets have termed him, God's noblest work. 



The old philosopher, whom we see gazing at the orbs of 



