Part 17

With reference to this, now highly important, subject, a writer in the _Times_ for 22nd October, 1881, points out that 'Sir Humphry Davy showed that when a powerful current passes across the point of contact of two carbon rods, their points become heated; and on separating them to a short distance, an arc of light shoots between them, and the carbons are raised to a white heat.' The writer adds, that 'all lamps (until lately) had this point chiefly in view; namely, to introduce an arrangement which should keep the carbon-points at the fixed distance found to be the most advantageous.' Surely here was the germ of that discovery which is now becoming so rapidly developed.

In the autumn he went with Lady Davy for a long tour on the Continent, accompanied by the illustrious Faraday, who was a bookseller's apprentice when Davy first knew him, as his assistant and secretary; and equipped (as on previous similar occasions) with a portable chemical apparatus. He passed (with a special passport from Napoleon) through Paris--fêted by all the Parisian savants, including Laplace, Gay-Lussac, Thénard, etc., but treating them, it is said, somewhat haughtily--thence through France and Switzerland into Italy, by way of Nice to Genoa, where he rested a few days in order to make some ineffectual experiments on the torpedo; and so on to Florence, visiting _en route_ all the most remarkable extinct volcanoes in the south of France. This year he was elected a Corresponding Member of the 1st class of the French Institute, who had previously awarded to him their prize of 3,000 livres for his treatise on 'Chemical Affinities.' In the spring of 1814 he reached Rome, where he spent a month; and thence visited Naples; all the while filling his note-books with interesting entries, personal, scientific, and poetic. On his return homeward he made the acquaintance of Volta, then seventy years old, at Milan, and he records his pleasure at conferring with the ingenious and amiable old man.

Midsummer found him at his beloved Geneva; and here he spent three delicious months in a villa whose garden sloped down to the cool blue waters of the lake. He wintered at Rome, busily occupied with his scientific pursuits, with shooting wild-fowl in the Campagna, and in the enjoyment of the intellectual society of the Eternal City;--not omitting to transmit the results of his studies for publication in the 'Philosophical Transactions.' It was about this time that the Geological Society of Penzance was started; and it need scarcely be said that it had from the first the best wishes of Davy, who contributed specimens to its cabinets, and subscribed a handsome sum towards its expenses.

This was not the only institution of a scientific nature of which Davy was an early patron, if not indeed an originator. Sir Roderick Murchison, in his 'Biography' by Geikie, mentions that Davy, Croker, and Reginald Heber were the real founders and earliest trustees of the Athenæum Club. And Sir John Rennie, in his 'Autobiography,' says as follows:

'Sir Humphry Davy, in the year 1825, originated the Zoological Society, and asked me to join, which I did most willingly; and perhaps it has been the most popular and successful of any modern society of that kind. It commenced operations by purchasing the well-known Cross collection of Exeter 'Change, in which, in my early days, I took an especial delight; for, considering all things, it was a very wonderful collection, and it is difficult to understand how, in such a confined and unhealthy spot, it could have been maintained in such good condition. The only other exhibition of the kind in London was at the Tower; the collection of animals there consisted of presents from the sovereigns of different countries. These were afterwards lent to the Zoological Society, who established their museum in the Regent's Park; and taking it altogether, it is probably the finest and best maintained in the world.'

In the spring of 1815 he returned to England, _viâ_ Mayence and Brussels, and bought for his residence a house in Lower Grosvenor Street, No. 28.

There is perhaps no subject connected with the career of Davy with which his name is more inseparably and more honourably associated than that now to be mentioned,--and it was a subject which even the genius of a Humboldt had failed to master--namely, the brilliant and philanthropical discovery of the Safety Lamp (the original lamp in its first and simplest form is preserved in the Royal Institution), which has often been described in detail. His brother goes fully into the train of reasoning and of experiments which led to its construction. It is, as he says, a cage of wire-gauze which actually makes prisoner the flame of the deadly fire-damp, and in its prison consumes it. This grand invention--and it is not the less grand because it is so simple--by which in all probability more lives have been saved than by any other invention of similar character,--Davy nobly refused to patent, lest the sphere of its usefulness should be restricted: indeed, throughout his life he was indifferent to mere money; he was constantly giving away things for which he had no immediate use, and never kept a book after he had once read it. He received for the invention of the Safety Lamp unbounded praise and heartiest thanks from the great body of coal-owners and coal-workers of the Tyne and Wear especially; and was presented by them, on 11th October, 1817, with a magnificent service of plate worth £2,500,[111] at a public dinner at the Queen's Head Hotel, Newcastle, when the Earl of Durham (then Mr. Lambton) said in the course of his speech: 'If your fame had needed anything to make it immortal, this discovery alone would have carried it down to future ages, and connected it with benefits and blessings.'

Of this lamp (which the miners call 'a Davy,') the inventor, with his usual philanthropic spirit, often said, 'I value it more than ANYTHING I EVER DID.' The Emperor of Russia sent him a magnificent silver-gilt vase, the cover of which was surmounted by a figure of the God of Fire weeping over his extinguished torch, and the present was accompanied by an autograph letter. Early in the following year, his services to Science and to Humanity were recognised, somewhat tardily, by his having a baronetcy conferred upon him by the English Sovereign.[112]

In the summer of 1818 he contemplated a second visit, with Lady Davy, to the Continent. The programme included Flanders, Austria, Rome, and Naples,[113] to the two last of which places he went commissioned by the Prince Regent to investigate at Pompeii the bases of the colours employed by the ancients in their frescoes; and to discover, if possible, some chemical process of unrolling the papyric MSS. affected by the fire at Herculaneum: in this, however, he was unsuccessful; and his want of success--a thing so unusual with him--afforded him infinite chagrin. Most of the summer and part of the autumn of 1819 were spent in luxurious repose at the baths of Lucca; but the winter found him again at Rome, all the while making notes and storing up thoughts for his delightful book, 'The Consolations of Travel.'

In the summer of 1820 he returned, by way of the south of France, to his house in Grosvenor Street, and deeply interested himself in an inquiry into the 'Connexion between Magnetism and Electricity,' the result of which he communicated to the Royal Society on the 12th November.

Again he visited Scotland; and Lockhart gives a graphic account of the party at Abbotsford, in the autumn of this year, as they started on a sporting expedition, in which, after sketching the portraits of some members of it, Scott's biographer goes on to say:

'But the most picturesque figure was the illustrious inventor of the safety-lamp. He had come for his favourite sport of angling, and had been practising it successfully with Rose, his travelling companion, for two or three days preceding this; but he had not prepared for coursing fields, or had left Charlie Purdie's troop for Sir Walter's on a sudden thought; and his fisherman's costume--a brown hat with flexible brim, surrounded with line upon line, and innumerable fly-hooks; jack-boots worthy of a Dutch smuggler, and a fustian surtout dabbled with the blood of salmon--made a fine contrast with the smart jackets, white cord breeches, and well-polished jockey-boots of the less distinguished cavaliers about him.'

After a merry lunch at Newark Castle they all moved on towards Blackandro, and, Lockhart continues:

'Davy, next to whom I chanced to be riding, laid his whip about the fern like an experienced hand, but cracked many a joke, too, upon his own jack-boots; and, surveying the long eager battalion of bush-rangers, exclaimed: "Good Heavens, is it thus that I visit the scenery of the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel'!" He then kept muttering to himself as his glowing eye (the finest and brightest that I ever saw) ran over the landscape, some of those beautiful lines from the conclusion of the 'Lay':

"But still When summer smiled on sweet Bowhill, And July's eve with balmy breath Waved the blue bells on Newark heath, When throstles sang on Hareheadshaw, And corn was green in Catterhaugh, And flourished, broad, Blackandro's oak, The aged harper's soul awoke," etc., etc.

'Mackenzie ("The Man of Feeling"), spectacled though he was, saw the first sitting hare, gave the word to slip the dogs, and spurred after them like a boy. All the seniors, indeed, did well as long as the course was upwards; but when puss took down the declivity, they halted, and breathed themselves upon the knoll, cheering gaily, however, the young people who dashed past and below them. Coursing on such a mountain is not like the same sport over a set of fine English pastures. There were gulfs to be avoided, and bogs enough to be threaded; many a stiff nag stuck fast, many a bold rider measured his length among the peat-hags; and another stranger to the ground besides Davy plunged neck-deep into a treacherous well-head, which, till they were floundering in it, had borne all the appearance of a piece of delicate green turf. When Sir Humphry emerged from his involuntary bath, his habiliments garnished with mud, slime, and mangled water-cresses, Sir Walter received him with a triumphant "_Encore!_" But the philosopher had his revenge; for, joining soon after in a brisk gallop, Scott put Sibyl Grey to a leap beyond her prowess, and lay humbled in the ditch, while Davy, who was better mounted, cleared it and him at a bound. Happily there was little damage done, but no one was sorry that the "sociable" had been detained at the foot of the hill.

'I have seen Sir Humphry in many places, and in company of many descriptions; but never to such advantage as at Abbotsford. His host and he delighted in each other, and the modesty of their mutual admiration was a memorable spectacle. Davy was, by nature, a poet; and Scott, though anything but a philosopher in the modern sense of that term, might, I think it very likely, have pursued the study of physical science with zeal and success, had he chanced to fall in with such an instructor as Sir Humphry would have been to him, in his early life. Each strove to make the other talk, and they did so in turn more charmingly than I ever heard either on any other occasion whatsoever. Scott, in his romantic narratives, touched upon a deeper chord of feeling than usual, when he had such a listener as Davy; and Davy, when induced to open his views upon any subject of scientific interest in Scott's presence, did so with a degree of clear energetic eloquence, and with a flow of imagery and illustration, of which neither his habitual tone of table-talk (least of all in London) nor any of his prose writings (except, indeed, the posthumous "Consolations of Travel") could suggest an adequate notion. I say his prose writings, for who that has read his sublime quatrains on the "Doctrine of Spinoza" can doubt that he might have united, if he had pleased, in some great didactic form, the vigorous ratiocination of Dryden and the moral majesty of Wordsworth? I remember William Laidlaw whispering to me one night, when their "rapt talk" had kept the circle round the fire until long after the usual bed-time of Abbotsford: "Gude preserve us! this is a very superior occasion! Eh, sirs!" he added, cocking his eye like a bird. "I wonder if Shakespeare and Bacon ever met to screw ilk other up!"'

I am also indebted to Lockhart for the following story:

'When Sir Walter Scott was debating in his mind the Prince Regent's offer of a baronetcy, he wrote to his friend Morritt: "After all, if one must speak for themselves, I have my quarters and emblazonments free of all stain but Border theft and high treason, which I hope are gentlemanlike crimes; and I hope 'Sir Walter Scott' will not sound worse than 'Sir Humphry Davy,' though my merits are as much under his, in point of utility, as can well be imagined. But a name is something, and mine is the better of the two."' When Mrs. Davy, Dr. Davy's wife, told Sir Walter Scott, at Malta, that her husband was writing his brother's life, Sir Walter said, 'I am glad of it; I hope his mother lived to see his greatness.' And it is pleasant to be able to record such was the case.

Not only Sir Walter Scott, but even the cold and reserved Poet of the Lakes, was deeply impressed with Davy's genius. Lockhart tells us that when Sir Walter and Wordsworth ascended Helvellyn, 'they were accompanied by an illustrious philosopher, who was also a true poet, and might have been one of the greatest of poets had he chosen; and I have heard Mr. Wordsworth say that it would be difficult to express the feelings with which he, who so often had climbed Helvellyn alone, found himself standing on its summit with two such men as _Scott_ and _Davy_.'

The crowning honour of Davy's life now awaited him. His friend Sir Joseph Banks--himself the successor of such men as Sir Christopher Wren, Sir Hans Sloane, and Sir Isaac Newton--who had held the post of President of the Royal Society for forty-two years, died on 19th June, 1820, and Sir Humphry was, almost unanimously, elected on the 30th of the following November. He continued to fill the post for seven successive years, and his annual addresses are very characteristic specimens of his eloquence and suavity. He retained the old practice of delivering his speeches in full court dress,[114] and with the Society's mace (Oliver Cromwell's celebrated 'bauble') laid before him. He also continued his predecessor's practice of having weekly evening gatherings of the most distinguished men of science of the day, so long as he remained in Lower Grosvenor Street; but they were discontinued on his moving, in 1825, to 26, Park Street, Grosvenor Square.

Davy now began to find that

'Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.'

He was worried by the numerous small duties which pertained to his prominent position, and was sadly disappointed at not being able to prevail upon the Government of the day to take up his somewhat magnificent views as to the development of the Royal Society, and the subordination of certain other great public establishments to it. He used to complain that the Government were only too glad to get anything they could out of the Society, but were loth to give back anything in return. I gather too, from what Dr. Davy says, that symptoms of failing health began, even thus early, to show themselves. He somewhat relaxed the severity of his labours--made trips to Ireland, Wales, and Scotland (dining at Edinburgh with Sir Walter Scott), chiefly with a view to enjoying the fine scenery, and the fishing and shooting; but, as regards Wales, also with the object of devising means for remedying the results produced by the noxious copper effluvia from the Smelting Works at Swansea.

In the autumn of 1821 he paid a visit to Penzance; always fond--as indeed most Cornishmen seem to be--of embracing an opportunity of revisiting his native place. On this occasion he was entertained at a public dinner; and he left his old home, doubtless expecting to see it again and again: but this was destined to be his last visit.

From 1823 to 1826 may be described as the last period of his scientific labours; and it was in a great measure devoted to investigations, undertaken at the request of the Government, into the best mode of preventing the destruction of the copper-sheathing of vessels by the action of the sea. This Davy to some extent accomplished by coating the copper with tin; but, unfortunately, the tin did not prevent (as the copper did) the fouling of the metal by accretions of seaweeds and shells; and the practical result was nil.

He was much disappointed at this, having taken great pains in the matter, and having even made a voyage to the North Sea for the purpose of conducting his experiments. Of this excursion, which included visits to Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, he has left copious records--though, as a general rule, he had now discontinued his diary--and these include his reflexions not only on the scenery, etc., through which he passed, but, according to his custom, his impressions of the distinguished men of science and others with whom he came in contact. Those circumstances which impressed Davy most deeply he often recorded, as was his practice throughout his life, in verse. A specimen may be given here in the following fragment written at Ullswater, which he visited in August, 1825:

'Ye lovely hills that rise in majesty Amidst the ruddy light of setting suns, Your tops are bright with radiance, while below The wave is dark and gloomy, and the vale Hid in obscurest mist. Such is the life Of Man: this vale of earth and waters dark And gloomy--but the mountains range above! The sky--the heavens are bright!----'

But he could not succeed in shaking off the illness of which he had had more than one warning; and even his elastic spirits began to flag under its depressing influence. The spring of 1826 found him worse; he complained much of rheumatism, and of slight numbness in his limbs; and the death of his mother in the autumn still further affected his health. With great pain and effort he delivered what proved to be his last address to the Royal Society--a body whose mission was so like his own, 'ad inquisitionem et inventionem naturæ veræ et interioris rerum omnium'--on St. Andrew's Day, 1826; and shortly after he suffered a slight attack of paralysis, which, however, did not prevent his revising his discourses, nor even deter him from projecting new scientific treatises. During his recovery he liked nothing better than having novels and romances read to him,--partly I should think to divert his mind from the small worries which were inevitable to one occupying the post which he filled, but which at this juncture pressed upon him with increasing force, and indeed probably conduced to his determining upon another visit to the Continent in January, 1827, accompanied on this occasion only by his brother, Dr. John Davy, an army surgeon.

The winter journey was rough and dreary. Paris was avoided, on account of the too great excitement which it was feared its society might induce; and the roads along which the travellers drove, bad at the best, were now in their very worst condition from the snow. The scenes through which they passed were uninteresting, the occasional roadside churches being the only noteworthy objects; and these they rarely failed to enter, the sick philosopher generally dropping on his knees for a silent prayer.

So they passed on, notwithstanding the severe cold and the snow, over the Mont Cenis, into Italy, reaching Ravenna on the 27th February--Davy, strange to say, rather the better than the worse for his cold and cheerless expedition. Here he rested for some time, occupying himself chiefly in shooting, fishing, and reading Byron, whose acquaintance (with that of the accomplished Countess Guiccioli) he had previously made at this place. His note-book was kept up, and was filled with numerous acute observations on subjects connected with natural history and chemistry, interspersed with expressions of pious humility and of gratitude to 'the Great Cause of all being.' His health improved; and in March, 1827, Dr. Davy returned to Corfu, whilst Sir Humphry shortly afterwards started on a solitary expedition through the Eastern Alps and down the Rhine. But his health now declined; he frequently had to apply leeches and blisters, and he lived so abstemiously as to considerably reduce his strength and spirits. 'Valde miserabilis!' he often exclaimed in his note-book; and once he wrote, 'Dubito fortissime restaurationem meam.' It was no doubt whilst in this mood that he wrote to Mr. Davies Gilbert from Salzburg, on 30th June, 1827, announcing his retirement from the office of President of the Royal Society.[115] Whilst on one of his numerous fishing expeditions, a pursuit[116] which, as we have seen, he passionately followed all his life long, he wrote about this time, the following pensive lines, _more suo_, on contemplating a rapid river:

'E'en as I look upon thy mighty flood, Absorb'd in thought, it seems that I become A part of thee, and in thy thundering waves My thoughts are lost, and pass to future time, Seeking the infinite, and rolling on Towards the eternal and unbounded sea Of the All-Powerful, Omnipresent Mind.'

This was a favourite thought of his. He amplified it in a letter which he addressed from Rome in the following year to his friend Poole:

'I have this conviction full on my mind,' he wrote, 'that intellectual beings spring from the same breath of Infinite Intelligence, and return to it again, but by different courses. Like rivers born amid the clouds of heaven, and lost in the deep and eternal ocean--some in youth, rapid and short-lived torrents; some in manhood, powerful and copious rivers; and some in age, by a slow and winding course, half lost in their career, and making their exit by many sandy and shallow mouths.'

The current of his own life now carried him back in one of its eddies to London, which he reached on 6th October.