Six Discourses Delivered Before the Royal Society at Their Anniversary Meetings, on the Award of the Royal and Copley Medals: Preceded by an Address to the Society, on the Progress and Prospects of Science |
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Six Discourses Delivered Before the Royal Society at Their Anniversary ... Humphry Davy No preview available - 2016 |
Six Discourses Delivered Before the Royal Society at Their Anniversary ... Humphry Davy No preview available - 2017 |
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Popular passages
Page 53 - ... feeling of admiration must we consider those grand monuments of nature, which mark the revolutions of the globe ; continents broken into islands ; one land produced, another destroyed ; the bottom of the ocean become a fertile soil ; whole races of animals extinct ; and the bones and...
Page 125 - Mr Dalton's permanent reputation will rest upon his having discovered a simple principle, universally applicable to the facts of chemistry - in fixing the proportions in which bodies combine, and thus laying the foundation for future labours, respecting the sublime and transcendental parts of the science of corpuscular motion. His merits, in this respect, resemble those of Kepler in astronomy.
Page 124 - Higgins, and that his work, called the Comparative View, was published some years after the treatises I have just quoted, and that his notions are almost identical (with the addition of this circumstance, that he mentions certain elastic fluids, such as the compounds of azote, consisting of...
Page 122 - ... to 3, or to 4 — he explained this fact on the Newtonian doctrine of indivisible atoms ; and contended that, the relative weight of one atom to that of any other atom being known, its proportions or weight in all its combinations might be ascertained, thus making the statics of chemistry depend upon simple questions in subtraction or multiplication and enabling the student to deduce an immense number of facts from a few well-authenticated accurate experimental results.
Page 13 - I shall be always happy to act as a private soldier in the ranks of science. ' Let us, then, labour together, and steadily endeavour to gain what are, perhaps, the noblest objects of ambition — acquisitions which may be useful to our fellow-creatures. Let it not be said, that, at a period when our empire was at its highest pitch of greatness, the sciences began to decline ; let us rather hope that posterity will find, in the Philosophical Transactions of our days, proofs that we were not unworthy...
Page 127 - ... obscurity of the country, neither asking for approbation, nor offering himself as an object of applause. He is but lately become a fellow of this Society, and the only communication he has given to you is one, compared with his other works, of comparatively small interest ; the feeling of the Council on the subject is therefore pure. I am sure he will be gratified by this mark of your approbation of his long and painful labours. It will give a lustre to his character, which it fully deserves...
Page 112 - Science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor space; it belongs to the world, and is of no country, and of no age...
Page 9 - ... fourth, the circumstance that the elementary particles of all bodies, appear to possess the same quantity of heat. In electricity, the wonderful instrument of Volta, has done more for the obscure parts of physics and chemistry, than the microscope ever effected for natural history, or even the telescope for astronomy. After presenting to us the most extraordinary and unexpected results in chemical analysis, it is now throwing a new light upon magnetism, Suppedilatque novo confestim lumine lumen.
Page 112 - science, like Nature, to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and no age.