Cuap. VIL, § 3.] 
and Electricity—was the subject of his earliest, and 
also that of his happiest essays. He was a very able 
chemist in the strictest sense of the word, although 
his ardour and his rapidity of generalizing might seem 
to unfit him, in some measure, for a pursuit which 
requires such intense watchfulness with regard to mi- 
nutie, such patient weighings of fractions of a grain, 
such frequent though easy calculations. To Caven- 
dish and Dalton, his great contemporaries—to whom 
we may now add Wollaston—these things were a 
pleasure in themselves ; to Davy they must ever have 
been irksome indispensables to the discovery of truth. 
But, in fact, Davy’s discoveries were almost indepen- 
dent of such quantitative details: Numerical rela- 
tions, and harmony of proportion, did not affect his 
ELECTRICITY.—DAVY. 
967 
seemingly without order, several investigations at 
once. As in conversation he is described as seem- 
ing to know what one was going to say before utter- 
ing it,—he had the art of divining things complex 
and obscure. Seizing on results, he left to others the 
not-inconsiderable merit, as well as labour, of pur- 
suing the details. Keenly alive as he was to the 
value of fame, and the applause which his talents 
soon obtained for him, he left enough of both for his 
friends ; his contemporaries, as well as his successors, 
were enabled to weave a chaplet from the laurels 
which he had not stooped to gather. 
These remarks apply quite as strongly to his dis- 
coveries in the laws and facts of electro-chemical de- Removed 
composition—those on which his fame most securely 
rests. Promoted in 1801 to a situation in the Labo- stitution— 
ratory of the Royal Institution in London, he attached ¢*peri- 
himself to the study of galvanism in the interval of abet 
the other and more purely chemical pursuits which electricity, 
mind with pleasure, which possibly was one reason 
of his deficient appreciation of works of art, the 
more remarkable from his poetic temperament. 
Dalton’s doctrine of atomic combinations was (as we 
ee EES ee 
ee eee i -_ 
(761.) 
His first 
have seen) slowly and doubtfully received by him 
whilst Wollaston perceived its truth instantaneously. 
A keener relish for such relations might most natu- 
rally have led Davy to an anticipation of Mr Fara- 
day’s notable discovery of the definite character of 
electrical decomposition, and the coincidence of the 
Electro-chemical proportions for different bodies with 
their atomic weights. . 
The early papers of Davy refer chiefly to Heat, 
papers, and Light, and Electricity. He was, in fact, a physicist 
the duties of his situation required. He had already, 
at Clifton, made experiments with the pile of Volta, 
and taken part in the discussion of its theory and 
effects, then (as we have seen) so actively carried on 
in Britain. In his papers of that period we find not 
only excellent experiments, but happy and just rea- 
soning. The chemical theory of the pile—namely, 
that the electrical effects observed by Galvani and 
Volta are due solely or chiefly to the chemical ac- 
tion of the fluid element on the metals—was more 
experi- more than a chemist. Whilst yet a surgeon’s ap- strongly embraced by him then than afterwards. In 
viteous, Prentice at Penzance, he satisfied himself of the im- November 1800 he concluded that “the pile of 
rai. materiality of heat, which he illustrated by some in- Volta acts only when the conducting substance be- 
genious experiments, in which, concurring unawares 
with the conclusions of his future patron Rumford, 
he laid one foundation of his promotion. Removed 
to a sphere of really scientific activity at Clifton, 
under Dr Beddoes,' he executed those striking re- 
searches in pneumatic chemistry and the physiologi- 
cal effects of breathing various gases which gave him 
his first reputation ; researches so arduous and full of 
risk as to require a chemist in the vigour of life, 
and urged by an unextinguishable thirst for dis- 
covery, to undertake them. Even his brilliant dis- 
covery of the effects of inhaling nitrous oxide brought 
no competitor into the field; and the use of anws- 
thetics, which might naturally have followed—the 
greatest discovery (if we except, perhaps, that of 
vaccination) for the relief of suffering humanity 
made in any age—was delayed for another generation. 
But so it was in all histriumphs. He never seemed 
to drain the cup of discovery. He quaffed only its 
freshest part. He felt the impulse of an unlimited 
command of resources. He carried on rapidly, and 
tween the plates is capable of oxidating the zine; 
and that in proportion as a greater quantity of oxy- 
gen enters into combination with the zinc in a given 
time, so in proportion is the power of the pile to de- 
compose water and to give the shock greater.” He 
concludes that “the chemical changes connected 
with” oxidation “ are somehow the cause of the elec- 
trical effect it produces.”* His views on this sub- 
ject underwent some modification afterwards, In 
his Elements of Chemical Philosophy, published twelve 
years later, we find the following statement of his 
opinions on the subject: —* Electrical effects are exhi- 
bited by the same bodies acting as masses, which 
produce chemical phenomena when acting by their 
particles ; it is, therefore, not improbable that the 
primary cause of both may be the same.” A little 
further on he adds :—* They,” speaking of electrical 
and chemical energies, “are conceived to be dis- 
tinct phenomena, but produced by the same power 
acting in the one case on masses, in the other on par- 
ticles,” 
1 Davy hit off his principal’s character in a single sentence,—“ Beddoes had talents which would have exalted him to the pin- 
nacle of philosophical eminence, if they had been applied with discretion.” 
2 Works, ii., 162. 
3 Works, iv., 119. In his Bakerian lecture (1806), he had said, “In the present state of our knowledge, it would be useless 
to attempt to speculate on the remote cause of the electrical energy, or the reason why different bodies, after being brought into 
contact, should be found differently electrified ; its relation to chemical affinity is, however, sufficiently evident. 
May it not 
be identical with it, and an essential property of matter ?” — Works, vol. v., p. 39. 
