REVIEWS — MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 377 



While Davy was delighting crowded audiences with his eloquence, his discov- 

 eries, and their wonderful results, "Wollaston was pursuing his solitary experi- 

 ments on a scale so small that scarcely three persons could witness them at once. 

 While Davy was firing his potassium with ice, and making mimic volcanoes heave 

 by the oxidation of his new metals, Wollaston was extracting, by minute analysis, 

 from the refractory and unoxidable ores of platiuum, substances previously un- 

 detected, which, neither by their quantity nor their characters, could ever interest 

 any but a man of science. While Davy was charging his prodigious battery of 

 2500 pairs — the largest which has ever been constructed (a homage to his genius, 

 provided by his numerous admirers J — Wollaston was proving, after his fashion, 

 how similar effects could be produced by the very same agency on a small scale ; 

 and with no greater apparatus than a sheet of zinc, a few drops of acid, and an 

 old thimble, he would gratify his friends by exhibiting the mimic glow of an 

 almost microscopic wire of platinum.* Davy seemed born to believe, Wollaston 

 to doubt. Davy was a poet; Wollaston a mathematician, or, at least, capable 

 of becoming a great one. Davy announced his discoveries in fiery haste, and pre- 

 sented all their consequences and corollaries as a free gift to mankind; Wollaston 

 (estimating more truly the rarity of the inventive faculty,) hoarded every obser- 

 vation, turned it over and over, polished it, rendered it exact beyond the reach of 

 criticism, and then deliberately laid it before the world. He had the coldness 

 and the accuracy of Cavendish, but he lacked the spur of his genius, and the wide 

 grasp of his apprehension. Among other legitimate results of discovery, Wollas- 

 ton was not unwilling to claim for his oavh the material benefits which such 

 researches sometimes, though rarely, yield; whilst Davy, as we have seen, 

 spurned every possible attribution of an interested motive. Davy never made a 

 shilling in his life, save as an author or a lecturer, (except as paid assistant to 

 Dr. Beddoes) ; Wollaston realised a fortune by his art of working platinum. 

 Davy was admired by thousands at home and abroad ; Wollaston was little known 

 except to a small circle who could appreciate the resources of a mind rarely 

 opened in confidence to any one, and of which the world was only partially 

 informed. The composure of his death-scene rivalled that of Black and Cav- 

 endish. His disorder was one of the brain. When he had lost the power of 

 speech, his attendants remarked aloud that he appeared unconscious. Making a 

 sign for a pencil and paper, he wrote down a column cf figures, added them up 

 correctly, and expired. 



A still different type is presented by Dalton ; born in humble cir- 

 cumstances, a consistent Quaker through life, scantily educated, and 

 laboring under disadvantages of person and manner : he maintained 

 himself in a grade barely above poverty by private teaching, and with- 

 out friendly encouragement, with deficient means, and apparatus rudely 

 constructed by his own hands, we find him making discoveries by 

 which the world now ranks him as the very first in the annals of Che- 

 mistry, yet which were at the time but coldly acknowledged ; nor was 

 it till towards the close of a long life that scientific honors were 



* So wonderful was his skill in dealing with the minutest quantity of a substance, that it 

 used to be said— give him a scrap of mineral only visible in the microscope, and he will tell 

 you not only what it is, and where it came from, but also the name of the person who 

 quarried it ! 



