278 THE EARLY HISTORY OF [CHAP. V. 



of the Institution. Lectures, indeed, are the support 

 of the Institution, but discovery constitutes its great 

 success ; and this year is famous for the first of those 

 great discoveries on which the credit of the Institution 

 depends. The union of chemistry and electricity was 

 established by Davy. 



Volta sent the first account of his discovery of the 

 voltaic pile to Sir Joseph Banks. His paper was 

 printed in the 'Philosophical Transactions' for 1800--- 

 on the ' Electricity Excited by the mere Contact of 

 Conducting Substances of Different Kinds.' Davy, on 

 October 20, 1800, wrote, ' Galvanism I have found, by 

 numerous experiments, to be a process purely chemical,' 

 and on June 18, 1801, the first paper Davy sent to the 

 Royal Society was on a galvanic combination of a 

 single metallic plate and two fluids. In May 1802 he 

 says, ' A battery of immense size has been made for 

 the Institution, and I am now examining the agencies 

 of it upon certain substances that have not been de- 

 composed.' His lectures on Agriculture, Mineralogy, 

 and Greology so occupied his time that very little 

 remained for original research, and it was not until 

 this year that a close examination of the decomposi- 

 tion of water by electricity led him to investigate 

 the action of the voltaic battery, and to establish 

 the union of electricity and chemistry. For this and 

 his former work the name of Davy ought for ever 

 to be inseparably united with the discovery of chemical 

 electricity. But the honour at that time paid to Davy 

 was not for establishing the production of electricity 

 by chemistry, but for endeavouring to prove that all 



