Consolations in Travel | Page 2

1801,
that Humphry Davy be appointed Assistant-Lecturer in Chemistry,
Director of the Chemical Laboratory, and assistant-editor of the
journals of the Royal Institution. His first remuneration was a room in
the house, coals and candles, and 100 pounds a year. Count Rumford
held out the prospect of a professorship with 300 pounds a year, and the
certainty of full support in the use of the laboratory for his own private
research. His age then was twenty-three. He at once satisfied men of
science and amused people of fashion. His energy was unbounded;
there was a fascination in his personal character and manner. He was a
genial and delightful lecturer, and his inventive genius was continually
finding something new. A first suggestion of the process of
photography was dropped incidentally among the records of researches
that attracted more attention. Davy had been little more than a year at
the Royal Institution when he was made its Professor of Chemistry.
After another year he was made a Fellow. Dr. Paris, his biographer,
says that "the enthusiastic admiration which his lectures obtained is at
this period scarcely to be imagined. Men of the first rank and talent--the
literary and the scientific, the practical, the theoretical--blue-stockings
and women of fashion, the old and the young, all crowded--eagerly
crowded--the lecture-room." At the beginning of the year 1805 his
salary was raised to 400 pounds a year. In May of that year the Royal
Society awarded to him the Copley Medal. Within the next two years
he was elected Secretary of the Royal Society. Since 1800 he had been
advancing knowledge by experiments with galvanism. The Royal
Institution raised a special fund to place at his disposal a more powerful
galvanic battery than any that had been constructed. The fame of his
discoveries spread over Europe.
The Institute of France gave Davy the Napoleon Prize of three thousand
francs for the best experiments in galvanism. Dublin, in 1810, paid
Davy four hundred guineas for some lectures upon his discoveries. The
Farming Society of Ireland gave him 750 pounds for six lectures on
chemistry applied to agriculture. In the following year he received more
than a thousand pounds for two courses of lectures at Dublin, and was
sent home with the honorary degree of LL.D. In April, 1812, he was

knighted, resigned his professorship at the Royal Institution, and "in
order more strongly to mark the high sense of his merits" he was
elected Honorary Professor of Chemistry. In the same month Davy
married a young and rich widow, who had charmed all Edinburgh by
her beauty and her wit. Two months after marriage Sir Humphry Davy
dedicated to his wife his "Elements of Chemical Philosophy." In March,
1813, he published his "Elements of Agricultural Chemistry." He
travelled abroad, and was received with honour by the chief men of
science in all places that he visited. When, at Pavia, he first met Volta:
he found that Volta had put on full-dress to receive him.
In August, 1815, Davy's attention was drawn to the loss of life by
explosions of fire-damp, and by the end of the year he had devised his
safety-lamp. The coal owners subscribed 1,500 pounds for a
testimonial, gave him also a dinner and a service of plate. In October,
1818, he was made a baronet. In November, 1820, he was elected
President of the Royal Society.
His next researches were chiefly on electro-magnetism and the
protection of the copper sheathing on ships' bottoms. At the end of
1826 his health failed seriously. He went to Italy; resigned, in July,
1827, the Presidency of the Royal Society; came back to England,
longing for "the fresh air of the mountains;" wrote and published his
"Salmonia, or Days of Fly-fishing." In the spring of 1828 he left
England again. He was at Rome in the winter of 1829, still engaged in
quiet research, and it was then that he wrote his "Consolations in Travel;
or, the Last Days of a Philosopher." His wife, who shone in London
society, did not go with him upon this last journey, but travelled day
and night to reach him when word came to her and to his brother John,
who was a physician, that he had again been struck with palsy and was
dying. That stroke of palsy followed immediately upon the finishing of
the book now in the reader's hand. Davy lived to see again his wife and
brother, rallied enough to leave Rome with them, and had got as far as
Geneva on the 28th of May, 1829. He died in the next night.
H. M.

A NOTE,
Prefixed to the First Edition, by Sir Humphry Davy's Brother.
As is stated in the Preface which follows, this work was composed
during a period of bodily indisposition;--it was concluded at the