JVetrology. — Sir Humphrey Davy. 157 



Art. XVII. — JYecrology. — Sir Humphrey Davy.^ 



Not having observed in the British Scientific Journals which have 

 reached us since the death of this distinguished benefactor of science, 

 any account of his life and death vs^hich deserves the name of a bio- 

 graphical sketch, we avail ourselves of a brief notice of him, which 

 we find in the Geneva Journal, (Bibhotheque Universelle,) of May, 

 1829, translated by Prof. Griscom. 



" Sir Humphrey Davy, who has just terminated at Geneva, his 

 brilliant scientific career, was born on the 17th of December, 1778, 

 at Penzance, in the county of Cornwall. 



"It was at Bristol, while engaged with Dr. Beddoes, in 1799, 

 that he first became known to the scientific world, by several ingen- 

 ious memoirs, in a journal entitled West Contributions ; and in a 

 short time after, he gave to the public his Analysis of JVitric Acid, 

 in which various new facts are brought forward, and in which the in- 

 dications of genius are clearly discoverable. Called to London by 

 the founders of the Royal Institution, among whom was Count Rum- 

 ford, he was made professor of chemistry, and his lectures were re- 

 ceived with enthusiasm. Having at his disposal the powerful re- 

 sources of that establishment, he availed himself of them in studying 

 the new phenomena which the Voltaic apparatus presented, and, in 

 his hands, this apparatus gave a strong impulse to the progress of sci- 

 ence. 



" The limits of this hasty notice do not allow us to trace this phi- 

 losopher through his minifold labors ; we can only point out, summa- 

 rily, those which are the most remarkable. 



" In 1806, he read to the Royal Society of London, his memoir 

 On the Chemical Agencies of Electricity, a memoir which will ever 

 constitute an epoch in the science ; and in which he demonstrated 

 by a series of facts entirely new, that electricity is a powerful chemi- 

 cal agent, having the faculty of decomposing bodies whose constituent 

 principles are united by the strongest affinities, and transporting to a 

 distance, through moist conductors, these same constituent parts ; the 

 most oxigenized substances uniting round the positive pole, while the 



* Wc are promised for the January iiuinhci', (1830,) a fuller uo(ice of the scientifir 

 labors and character of Sir H, Davy, but in Ihc meantime, with pleasure, insert the 

 (icncvan obituary. 



