384 Sir Humphry Davy on the relations of 
finished state, because the discovery of Oersted and that of 
Morichini, illustrated by some late ingenious enquiries, 
connect the electro- chemical changes with entirely new 
classes of facts, and induce a hope that many of the compli- 
cated phenomena of corpuscular changes, now obscure, will 
ultimately be found to depend upon the same causes, and to 
be governed by the same laws ; and that the simplicity of 
our scientific arrangements will increase with every advance 
in the true knowledge of nature. 
II. Some historical details. 
As I am not acquainted with any work in which full and 
accurate statements on the origin and progress of electro- 
chemical science are to be found, and as some very erroneous 
statements have been published abroad, and repeated in this 
country, I shall take the liberty of laying before the Society 
a short historical sketch on this subject ; which is the more 
wanted, as the journal in which the early discoveries were 
registered has long been discontinued, and is now little known 
or referred to. 
As there are historians of chemistry and astronomy who 
date the origin of these sciences from antediluvian times, 
so there are not wanting persons who imagine the origin 
of electro-chemical science before the discovery of the pile 
of Volta; and Ritter and Winterl have been quoted* 
amongst other persons as having imagined, or anticipated 
the relation between electrical powers and chemical affinities, 
before the period of this great invention. But whoever will 
read with attention Ritter’s “ Evidence that the galvanic 
* Oersted, translated by Marcel, 1813. 
