THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



description. We should rather, through the instru- 

 mentality of men of science, soften the asperities of 

 national hostility." 



Here it was that Davy explicitly" stated his belief 

 that "chemical and electrical attraction are produced 

 by the same cause, acting in one case on particles, in 

 the other on masses," and that " the same property, 

 under different modifications, is the cause of all the 

 phenomena exhibited by different voltaic combinations." 

 The phenomena of galvanism were thus linked with 

 chemical action on the one hand, and with frictional 

 electricity on the other, in the first decade of the cen- 

 tury, showing that electricity is by no means the iso- 

 lated "fluid" that it had been thought. But there the 

 matter rested for another decade. The imaginative 

 Davy, whose penetrative genius must have carried him 

 further had it not been diverted, became more and more 

 absorbed in the chemical side of the problem ; and 

 Young, having severed his connection Avith the Royal 

 Institution, was devoting himself to developing his med- 

 ical practice, and in intervals of duty to deciphering 

 Egyptian hieroglyphics. Parenthetically it may be 

 added that Young was far too much in advance of his 

 time to make a great success as a practitioner (people 

 demand sophistry rather than philosophy of their fam- 

 ily physician), but that his success with the hiero- 

 glyphics was no less novel and epoch-making than his 

 work in philosophy. 



For a time no master-generalizer came to take the place 

 of these men in the study of the "imponderables "as such, 

 and the phenomena of electricity occupied an isolated cor- 

 ner in the realm of science, linked, as has been said rather 

 to chemistry than to the field we now term physics. 



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