THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITITUTION. 121 



to be at tbe trouble to turn over the pages of a peeragct could ascer- 

 tain to be false. 



One fact, however, rests on the indisputable authority of Mr. 

 DaVies Grilbert, President of the Eoyal Society ; and it is this : that 

 Smithson enjoyed the intimate friendship of the Hon. Henry Caven- 

 dish, who could trace an unbroken pedigree, through Sir John 

 Cavendish the Lord Chief Justice of Edward III. back to an ancestry 

 of Norman blood, famous in the days of the Conquest ; but whose 

 claim to the memory of this later generation rests on the better 

 foundation of his distinction among the English philosophers of the 

 eighteenth century, when Watt, Priestley, "Woolaston, Davy, Black, 

 and Thompson along with Cavendish, were adding lustre to English 

 science by their brilliant discoveries in chemistry, and the kindred 

 sciences. But to have been the intimate friend of the high born 

 British Chemist, implies some very peculiar traits in the possessor 

 of such a claim to our notice. Cavendish was a recluse, scarcely 

 less difficult of access than some eremite dwelling in desert haunts, 

 remote from human kind. Such was his extreme reserve and love of 

 retirement, that though for half a century a distinguished fellow of 

 the Eoyal Society, a member of the Erench Institute, and a student of 

 science who had won a European reputation : yet his modern biogra- 

 pher* found it almost as difficult to recover any detailed materials for 

 his life, as is now the case in reference to our less famous student of 

 physics. By the time that Smithson began to take an active part in 

 the proceedings of the Eoyal Society, Cavendish had his town residence 

 in Montague Place, close to the British Museum, where the few visi- 

 tors who were able to penetrate into the domestic sanctuary of the 

 scientific recluse, have left on record that books and apparatus 

 constituted its chief furniture. A suburban villa at Clapham, which 

 formed his favourite residence, was in like manner occupied through- 

 out with workshops, laboratory, astronomical, meteorological, and 

 electrical apparatus. There his rare guests invariably found the 

 same homely fare. According to the information supplied to his 

 biographer by a Eellow of the Eoyal Society, the dinner table was 

 provided with a leg of mutton, and nothing more. On one occasion 



* The life of the Eon, Henry Cavendish, including abstracts of his more impor- 

 tant Scientific papers, and a critical inquiry into the claims of all his alleged dis- 

 coveries of the Composition of Water. By George Wilson, M.D., P.R.S.E. Lon- 

 don : 1851. 



