ART. II.-The Collected Works of SIR HUMPHRY DAVY, Bart., LL.D., P.R.S., Foreign Associate of the Institute of France, etc. Edited by his Brother, JOHN DAVY, M.D., F.R.S., 3 Vols. London: 1839.

Ir will be sixty-six years next seventeenth of December since Humphry Davy was born at the homely and secluded little town of Penzance, among the mines of Cornwall. It is a county of classical antiquity for commerce with the world in its metallic riches. It is streaked with beauty. It spurns the tides of both St. George's and the English Channels with its Plutonic cliffs. The Atlantic is beyond.

His mother, Grace Millett, was left an orphan child, in company with an elder and a younger sister. They were not in want, however; and they were kindly guided by a good man, Tonkin, a surgeon-apothecary of the place, who had lodged with their parents. She was a mild and reflective woman, and, to have done so well by her family, must have been eminently steady of purpose. She had five children, yet never made a favourite of Humphry, her first-born and her stay; and happily she lived to see his honourable labours crowned with success by God and man.

His father Robert was bred in London to the liberal old handicraft of wood-carving. He did not do much work at Penzance, but farmed the little copyhold of Varfell, some two miles out of the town. He was venturous upon a little scale, and apt to lose his money. A man of social temper, if not of jovial dispositions, Mr. Davy seems to have walked through the world as becomingly as possible. He was short-lived like his son, and died when Humphry was only sixteen.

The name of Davy stands on the old church-tablets of the neighbourhood as that of the proprietors of Varfell, a small estate in Mountsbay. One of these is so far back in date, indeed, as 1635; but the lineage of Sir Humphry Davy, Baronet, Doctor of Laws, and President of the Royal Society, can be traced no farther up than to his grandfather, a substantial house-builder in the west of Cornwall. The Milletts, too, one of his biographers is careful to tell the enlightened world, were originally 'aristocratic and wealthy;' but alas! their fortunes had so crumbled down as to leave little Grace and her sisters the heirlings of a merceryshop in a place with no more than 2000 inhabitants. Let the Milletts and the Davys, however, have been in ancestry what they may, so small a consideration can never affect the simple fact that the one Davy, whom history cares about, was born and bred

amid the influences of what may be called the trades-professional sphere of the society composing the most primitive and isolated of English mining towns, and that in somewhat needy and afflictive circumstances. It is more interesting to know that from the Last of the Carvers, as the people of Penzance called his skilful father, he inherited a contriving head and learned hands; while to his gentle mother he owed the temperament and the habits of serious contemplation.

His boyhood was in no way remarkable. He learned his letters quickly; read Esop's fables and the Pilgrim's Progress like other British lads; preferred the perusal of history books to learning his lessons; was an idle schoolboy in fact; used to harangue his companions, as well as tell them stories; made verses, thunder-powder and turnip-lanthorns; caught grey mullet at the pier better than his playmates, by the help of a device of his own; organized and headed troops of puerile soldiers, with pasteboard shields and wooden swords; and, as he grew bigger, shot birds among the lanes, as well as got up some sort of play for his schoolfellows and himself to act in character. Consequently, there is no wonder that when sent to Cardew's school at Truro, at fourteen years of age, the Doctor 'found him very deficient in the qualifications for the class of his age,' and 'could not discern the faculties by which he was afterwards so distinguished;' although 'his turn for poetry' was both noticed and encouraged. In a word, living more with old Tonkin than with his parents, the amiable yet wilful boy was, as he long after rejoiced to remember, left very much to himself, was put on no particular plan of study, and enjoyed much idleness: a noble education in those rare conjunctions where affectionate yet indulgent friends, and the simple manners of a country-town, conspire with magnificent and multiform displays of Nature to kindle and unfold a young character, in which the elements are so sweetly tempered as they were in Davy.

Leaving the Truro school at fifteen he idled, played billiards, fished, fowled, swam and took lessons in French; till, two years after, he was apprenticed to a medical practitioner of the name of Borlase. His father having died the year before, he now displayed that determination to succeed which not only never forsook him, but conducted him from victory to victory; as it did Napoleon, and as it shall lead every man of prowess that is yet to act upon the fortunes of the world. His faithful brother and biographer has recorded a plan of study composed by the future discoverer at this time; embracing theology natural and revealed, geography, six professional studies, logic, physics, rhetoric and oratory, history, mathematics, and seven languages. This pitch of cultivation he never reached, and

never flew; but how aspiring! In truth he was too spontaneous to be a plodder, and had not yet acquired that nobler way of using books which is never learned but by a few. Connected with this was the amazing rapidity with which he would rush through a book from his very boyhood. A youth of sinewy faculty, rather than of craving capacity, he felt the noble necessity of discharging his bursting but imprisoned force in repeated, and still repeated, acts of original production. Accordingly, he was for ever writing; on religion, describing the arc of declension into solid materialism and of reascension into the more mobile elements of a kind of rational orthodoxy; on government; on climate; on friendship and love; on the ultimate end of being: and such subjects. He wandered alone by the shore, oppugning the all-eloquent sea in order to practise his ambitious oratory alone he sought and loved all the great and beautiful objects around him, and wooed them too, for his muse was still awake in spite of metaphysics and medicine: and he sat live-long hours alone upon the cliffs of 'Majestic Michael,' dreaming of glory; the masterpassion of his life already asserting her royal prerogative. Then we are told how he fell in love with a young French stranger, and wrote impassioned sonnets in her praise and we believe it, love being an almost unfailing element of genius; for genius is nothing but a thorough self-reliant manliness after all, resolute to do and become all that manhood may. Be these fine things about love and genius as they may, however, poor Davy's early passion must have been very transitory. Did we not know that women generally smile upon the fervid, and that Dr. Paris is a gossip, we should say that probably the youthful savant's unheeded and ungainly figure defeated him in the eyes of the fair foreigner, maugre his fine hair, his sparkling eyes and his eloquence. At all events, his young heart was already on fire for glory; and on he pressed to feed, if not to quench, the avidity of its rage by conquests of another kind. Ambitious of graduating one day in medicine, at Edinburgh, he advanced from his crude but bold disquisitions in metaphysics to professional studies with the same ardour, and speculated there also like a young Titan. About nineteen he began the study of chemistry; after a year of geometry and other branches of mathematics, won from the hand of Time by his own arm. Now commenced his life for the world. He had not been many months studying LAVOISIER'S lucid Elements and, in his self-tuitive way, experimenting with glasses and cups, plates and saucers, tobacco-pipes and bladders, old barometer-tubes and a syringe, when, with the audacity of an eaglet, he surveyed the science from his own point of view; thought he could" overthrow the French chemistry in half an hour;' and propounded a new theory of heat and light for himself, doing his little best to

support it by a series of rude and inapplicable, but ingenious experiments. Then-a-days one could acquire a very complete bookknowledge of chemistry, as a theory of one part of nature, in a very short space of time. The erroneous theory, devised by Beccher and propounded by STAHL, which referred all chemical phenomena to the agency of an invisible, inseparable and imaginary substance, called Phlogiston, had enough of truth in it: (viz. the recognition of the essential resemblance that exists between the natural operations of the rusting and fixation of metals and the burning of bodies, as well as the analogy in composition of acids, alkalis, earths and metallic calces) this doctrine of phlogiston had enough of truth in it to have enabled Neumann, Pott and Margraaf; Réaumur, Duhamel and Macquer; Bergmann and Scheele; Black, Priestley and Cavendish, to collect a compacted body of well-ascertained and far from ill-arranged observations. These the labours of LAVOISIER and his countrymen Berthollet, Morveau, Monge and Fourcroy had rendered still more definite and indubitable: and then, to consummate the movement (which the doctrine of STAHL did, let it never be forgotten, in reality originate) those facts had been disenchanted of the talisman that had hitherto held them together, in charmed bondage to the idea of the whimsical but magnificent Joachim Beccher, during the space of nearly a hundred years; and been drawn, as orderly and almost as easily reckoned as the planets, around the central thought of the lucid and organific Lawgiver. Accordingly, all that Davy could find in his Elementary Treatise* we undertake to describe in a single sentence. If we fail it shall not be our fault, but our courteous reader's pleasure; inasmuch as we shall not break it down except for the sake of returning his courtesy in not only accompanying us so far as we have come, but in now resolving to go forward, in defiance of the technical barbarities and sterner difficulties that may seem to beset the way, to see what our fearless young Cornish giant really did for this curious science.

Well, from LAVOISIER he learned that the earth, the water and the air, with all that they include, are the objects of the chemist's fond investigation: That he inquires into the composition of each of them in particular, in quest of their general law of composition: That the earth is made up of metals and other combustible solids, oxides of metals, acids, alkalis and earths; the air of three kinds of air, oxygen about 20 parts and nitrogen about 80 parts in 100, with but a small proportion of carbonic acid

* Traité Elémentaire de Chimie, présenté dans un ordre nouveau et d'apres les découvertes modernes, &c. Par M. Lavoisier, &c. 1789.

in 1000 parts; and the water of oxygen nearly 8 parts and hydrogen, another kind of air, 1 part by weight, holding dissolved in its substance varying quantities of such of the soluble ingredients of the earth and the air as have been exposed to its action: That according to the new principle regarding the material elements, viz. that every substance, not resolved by the skill of the chemist into two or more simpler ones, is for the time being to be counted for an element, the world in gross is produced by the combinations and mixtures of seventeen metals, from antimony down to zinc; of six non-metallic oxidable bodies, three* known and three† only inferred; of five earths; of two alkalis ;‡ of three gases, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen, the first of these being the most important in the actual operations of nature, at least in this planet; and of two imponderable but not inseparable creatures, heat and light, which cannot be procured apart from the more substantial forms of matter, either singly or together: That as the mechanical phenomena of the globe, such as the tides, the flow of rivers, the descent of avalanches, the fall of rains and the sweep of winds, result from changes in place among the mingled sensible components of creation, produced by the force of gravitation; so the chemical phenomena of the same, such as combustion, phosphorescence, lightning, the quickening of the blood of animals by respiration, the vegetation of plants and animals, (so far as that is unconnected with a higher force, above chemistry as well as superior to gravitation) the corrosion of metals, the weathering of rocks, putrefaction, fermentation, with all sorts of decay and renovation in short, result from changes in place among the combined insensible ingredients of sensible shapes, that is among the particles of matter, produced by the force of affinity, a word introduced by Barchusen, and first defined by Boerhaave: That the differences between gravitation and affinity are, first, that the former moves masses, the latter particles of matter; and, secondly, that the former draws and binds all kinds of masses to each other, but the latter only different kinds of particles; so that particles of oxygen do not combine chemically together, nor hydrogen particles together, but oxygen and hydrogen, or (circumstances being favourable) any other two kinds do unite so as to produce a third new species of matter, (in this instance it is water,) possessing none of the specific properties of either of its ingredients: That gravitation operates upon particles precisely as upon masses, that is on all

* Carbon, sulphur, and phosphorus.

The muriatic, fluoric and boracic radicals they were called.

Although (2d edition, 1793,) Lavoisier does not put them among the elements, on account of their being so obviously compound.