

THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN PHYSICS 



The question of the hour was whether in galvanism 

 the world had to do with a new force, or whether it is 

 identical with electricity, masking under a new form. 

 Yery early in the century the profound, if rather cap- 

 tious, Dr. Wollaston made experiments which seemed to 

 show that the two are identical ; and by 1807 Dr. Young 

 could write in his published lectures : "The identity of 

 the general causes of electrical and of galvanic effects is 

 now doubted by few." To be entirely accurate, he 

 should have added, " by few of the leaders of scientific 

 thought," for the lesser lights were by no means so fully 

 agreed as the sentence cited might seem to imply. 



But meantime an even more striking affinity had been 

 found for the new agent galvanism. From the first it 

 had been the chemists rather than the natural philoso- 

 phers the word physicist was not then in vogue who 

 had chiefly experimented with Yolta's battery ; and the 

 acute mind of Humphry Davy at once recognized the 

 close relationship between chemical decomposition and 

 the appearance of the new " imponderable." The great 

 Swedish chemist Berzelius also had an inkling of the 

 same thing. But it was Davy who first gave the 

 thought full expression, in a Bakerian lecture before 

 the Royal Society in 1806 the lecture which gained 

 him not only the plaudits of his own countrymen, but 

 the Napoleonic prize of the French Academy at a time 

 when the political bodies of the two countries were in 

 the midst of a sanguinary war. " Science knows no 

 country," said the young Englishman, in accepting the 

 French testimonial, against the wishes of some of the 

 more narrow-minded of his friends. " If the two coun- 

 tries or governments are at war, the men of science are 

 not. That would, indeed, be a civil war of the worst 



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