1808, JEfr. 30.] PROFESSOR DAVY. 351 



which this Institution is now again opened, and how it 

 comes to pass that it has fallen to me rather than to a 

 more deserving lecturer to be the first to address you. 



' The managers of this Institution have directed me to 

 impart to you that intelligence which no one who is alive 

 to the best feelings of human nature can hear without the 

 mixed emotions of sorrow and delight. 



1 Mr. Davy, whose frequent and powerful addresses from 

 this place, supported by his ingenious experiments, have 

 been so long and so well known to you, has for the last 

 five weeks been struggling between life and death. The 

 effects of those experiments recently made in illustration 

 of his late splendid discovery, added to consequent bodily 

 weakness, brought on a fever so violent as to threaten the 

 extinction of life. Over him it might emphatically be said, 

 in the language of the immortal Milton, that 

 Death his dart shook, but delayed to strike. 



If it had pleased Providence to deprive the world of all 

 further benefit from his original talents and intense applica- 

 tion there has certainly been sufficient already effected by 

 him to entitle him to be classed among the brightest scien- 

 tific luminaries of his country. That this may not appear 

 to be unfounded eulogium I shall proceed, at the particular 

 request of the managers, to give yon an outline of the 

 splendid discovery just alluded to, and I do so with the 

 greater pleasure as that outline has been drawn in a very 

 masterly manner by a gentleman of all others perhaps the 

 best qualified to do it effectually (Cavendish ?) 



' In the course of the last twenty-five or thirty years the 

 science of chemistry has undergone great changes and has 

 been astonishingly augmented by various important dis- 

 coveries, amongst which the most remarkable have been the 

 decomposition and recomposition of water and of nitric acid, 

 discovered by Mr. Cavendish, and the consequent knowledge 

 of the nature of metallic calces (now called oxides) with 

 that of acids in general. 



