218 Scientific Labors and Character of 



Sir Humphry Davy was born December 17tli, 1779, at Pen- 

 zance, in Cornwall. Although his family is represented as some- 

 what above the middle rank, yet his father's estate had been so much 

 reduced as to afford him little or no prospect of a patrimony ;* but at 

 the age of sixteen, when his fatlier died, he was thrown upon the 

 world, like many others who have risen to the highest eminence, with 

 no resources but such as he could create for himself by die efforts of 

 his own mind. 



Of his early years, we are furnished with the following particu- 

 lars. " He was always considered as a distinguished boy ; and there 

 are many natives of Penzance, who remember his poems and verses 

 written at the early age of nine years. f At that period his mind 

 seems to have received a bias in favor of poetry, which he continued 

 to cultivate until his fifteenth year, when he became the pupil of Dr. 

 Borlase, of Penzance, a very ingenious surgeon and accomplished 

 man, intending to prepare himself for graduating as a physician at 

 Edinburgh, Conscious of uncommon powers, and resolved to at- 

 tempt a nobler career than circumstances appeared to promise, or 

 his friends could expect, Mr. Davy laid down for himself a plan of 

 education which embraced the circle of the sciences. By his 

 eighteenth year, he had acquired the rudiments of botany, anatomy 

 and physiology, the simpler mathematics, metaphysics, natural phi- 

 losophy and chemistry. But chemistry soon arrested his whole at- 

 tention, for he at once saw that this science offered the best unex- 

 plored field for the exertion of talent. J" 



To begin the study of chemistry was, for a genius so inventive as 

 his, to begin the career of discovery ; and, accordingly, his first ex- 

 periments bore the impress of originality. He proved, by the exam- 

 ination of sea-weed, that marine plants exert the same influence upon 

 the air contained in the water of the ocean, as land vegetables exert 

 on the atmosphere. We recognize in this tendency of a mind to 

 strike out new lights in science, its likeness to such master spirits as 

 Bacon and Newton and Leibnitz, whose originality did not wait un- 

 til they had explored every dark corner of the sciences to which 

 •they severally devoted themselves, but begun to display itself almost 



* Monthly Mag. 1. 377. 



t It is stated in " The Artisan," that several of these effusions, written before Davy 

 was ten years of age, were published in the periodicals of the time, and were much 

 admired. % Monthly Mag. 1. 378. 



