INTRODUCTION.

Humphry Davy was born at Penzance, in Cornwall, on the 17th of December, 1778, and died at Geneva on the 29th of May, 1829, at the age of fifty.  He was a philosopher who turned knowledge to wisdom; he was one of the foremost of our English men of science; and this book, written when he was dying, which makes Reason the companion of Faith, shows how he passed through the light of earth into the light of heaven.

His father had a small patrimony at Varfell, in Ludgvan.  His mother had lost in early childhood both her parents within a few hours of each other, and had been adopted by John Tonkin, an eminent surgeon in Penzance, to whom, therefore, so to speak, Humphry Davy became grandson by adoption.  There were five such grandchildren—­Humphry, the elder of two boys, the other boy being named John, and three girls.

At a preparatory school and at the Penzance Grammar School Humphry Davy was a noticeable boy.  He read eagerly and showed great quickness of imagination, delighted in legends, when eight years old told stories to his companions, and as a boy wrote verse.  There was a Quaker saddler who made for himself an electrical machine and mechanical models, in which young Davy took keen interest, and from that saddler, Robert Dunkin, came the first impulse towards experiments in science.  At fifteen Davy was placed for further education at a school in Truro.  A year later his father died, and John Tonkin apprenticed him, on the 10th of February, 1795, to Dr. Borlase, a surgeon in large practice at Penzance.  Medical practitioners in those days dispensed their own medicines, and the inquiring mind of this young apprentice being let loose upon a store-room of chemicals, experimental chemistry became his favourite pursuit.  His grandfather, by adoption, allowed him to fit up a garret as a laboratory, notwithstanding the fears of the household that “This boy, Humphry, will blow us all into the air.”

Activity and originality of mind, with a persistent habit of inquiry and experiment, brought Davy friends who could appreciate and help him.  When Dr. Beddoes, of Bristol, was examining the Cornish coast, in 1798, he came upon young Humphry Davy, was told of researches made by him, and urged to engage him as laboratory assistant in a Pneumatic Institution that he was then establishing in Bristol.  Davy went in October, 1798, then in his twentieth year; but his good friend, and grandfather by adoption, had set his heart upon Humphry’s becoming an eminent burgeon, and even altered his will when his boy yielded to the temptation of a laboratory for research.  Men also know something of the trouble of the hen who has a chance duckling in her brood, and sees that contumacious chicken run into the water deaf to all the warnings of her love.