Consolations in Travel

Consolations in Travel

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Consolations in Travel, by Humphrey
Davy, Edited by Henry Morley
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Title: Consolations in Travel or, the Last Days of a Philosopher
Author: Humphrey Davy
Editor: Henry Morley
Release Date: February 28, 2006 [eBook #17882]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
CONSOLATIONS IN TRAVEL***

Transcribed from the 1889 Cassell & Company edition by David Price,
email [email protected]

CONSOLATIONS IN TRAVEL; OR, THE LAST DAYS OF A
PHILOSOPHER.
BY SIR HUMPHRY DAVY, BART., Late President of the Royal
Society.
CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED: LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK
& MELBOURNE. 1889

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.
At Bristol Humphry Davy came into companionship with Coleridge
and Southey, who were then also at the outset of their career, and there
are poems of his in the Poetical Anthology then published by Southey.
But at the same time Davy contributed papers on "Heat, Light, and the
Combinations of Light," on "Phos-Oxygen and its Combinations," and
on "The Theory of Respiration," to a volume of West Country
Collections, that filled more than half the volume. He was
experimenting then on gases and on galvanism, and one day by
experiment upon himself, in the breathing of carburetted hydrogen, he
almost put an end to his life.
In 1799 Count Rumford was founding the Royal Institution, and its
home in Albemarle Street was then bought for it. The first lecturer
appointed was in bad health, and in 1801 he was obliged to resign.
Young Davy was now known to men of science for the number and

freshness of his experiments, and for the substantial value of his
chemical discoveries. It was resolved by the managers, in July,