22 LIFE OF 



you the beginning of the next session. I shall ask permission 

 to witness the results of some of your experiments in the course 

 of the next month. I think of leaving London for a fortnight, 

 and there is no place that I have so great a desire to visit as 

 your delightful scenery. The hope of the pleasure of your 

 society, the banks of the Teme, and the grayling fishing, are an 

 assemblage of temptations which will induce me to bend my 

 course towards Herefordshire. Two philosophical friends, Mr. 

 Children and Mr. Pepys, have promised to be my companions 

 in this little journey, and we propose to establish our head- 

 quarters at Leominster and Leintwardine, from which last place 

 I shall have the opportunity of paying you a visit, and I hope 

 you will permit us all to join in a fly-fishing party. 



" I have been much engaged in experiments since I had the 

 pleasure of seeing you, and I have succeeded in decomposing 

 all the earths*, which turn out to be highly combustible metals 

 united to oxygen. I am, my dear sir, with respectful compli- 

 ments to Mrs. Knight, 



" Very sincerely your obliged, 



" H. DAVY." 



" Cobham, Kent, November 3, 1810. 



"My DEAR SIR: 



" I cannot yet profit by the kind permission you have given 

 me to submit my ideas upon vegetable chemistry to your obser- 

 vations and corrections, for I have only just commenced that 

 part of my labours, and I do not hope to be able to get through 

 it till the beginning of the spring. In considering the physiology 

 of the subject, I shall have little to do but to record your 

 labours, for you have created almost all the science we possess 

 on that interesting subject ; my aim will be to throw out some 

 chemical hints upon the nature of vegetable nutrition, and the 

 conversion of dead into living matter, and which may at length 



* The experiments thus simply reported form the subject of his second 

 Bakerian Lecture ; and, " since Newton's first discoveries in Optics, it may be 

 questioned, whether so successful an instance of philosophical induction has ever 

 been afforded." See Paris's Life of Sir Humphrey Davy. 



