336 THE EOYAL INSTITUTION. [CHAP. VI. 



the clouds of ill-health, will appear to all men, not as an 

 uncertain and brilliant flame, but as a fair and permanent 

 light, fixed, though constantly in motion, as a sun which 

 gives its fire not only to its attendant planets, but which 

 sends beams from all its parts into all worlds. 



May blessings attend you, my dear friend ! Do not forget 

 me ; we live for different ends and with different habits 

 and pursuits, but our feelings with regard to each other 

 have, I believe, never altered. They must continue ; they 

 can have no natural death. I trust they can never be 

 destroyed by fortune, chance, or accident. 



H. DAVY. 



In October Davy thus wrote to a friend on the 

 death of Gregory Watt, the son of James Watt : 



We are deceived, my dear Clayfield, if we suppose that 

 the human being who has formed himself for action, but 

 who has been unable to act, is lost in the mass of being. 

 There is some arrangement of things which we can never 

 comprehend, but in which his faculties will be applied. 



The caterpillar, in being converted into an inert scaly 

 mass, does not appear to be fitting itself for an inhabitant of 

 the air, and can have no consciousness of the brilliancy of 

 its future being. We are masters of the earth, but perhaps 

 we are the slaves of some great but unknown beings. The 

 fly that we crush with our finger or feed with our viands, 

 has no knowledge of man and no consciousness of his 

 superiority. We suppose that we are acquainted with 

 matter and with all its elements, and yet we cannot even 

 guess at the cause of electricity or explain the laws of the 

 formation of the stones which fall from meteors. 



There may be beings thinking beings near us, sur- 

 rounding us, which we do not perceive, which we can never 

 imagine. We know very little, but, in my opinion, we 

 know enough to hope for the immortality the individual 

 immortality of the better part of man. 



