Humphry Davy, the eldest son of “Carver” Robert Davy and his wife Grace Millett, was born on the 17th December, 1778.A His biographers are not wholly agreed as to the exact place of his birth. In the “Lives of Philosophers of the Time of George III.” Lord Brougham states that the great chemist was born at Varfell, a homestead or “town-place” in the parish of Ludgvan, in the Mount’s Bay, where, as the registers and tombstones of Ludgvan Church attest, the family had been settled for more than two hundred years. AIn some biographical notices—e.g. in the Gentleman’s Magazine, xcix. pt. ii. 9—the year is given as 1779. Mr. Tregellas, in his “Cornish Worthies” (vol. i., p. 247), also leaves the place uncertain, hesitating, apparently, to decide between Varfell and Penzance. According to Dr. John Davy, his brother Humphry was born in Market Jew Street, Penzance, in a house now pulled down, but which was not far from the statue of him that stands in front of the Market House of this town. Dr. Davy further states that Humphry’s parents removed to Varfell some years after his birth, when he himself was taken charge of by a Mr. Tonkin. The grandfather of Humphry, Edmund Davy, was a builder of repute in the west of Cornwall, who married well and left his eldest son Robert, the father of the chemist, in possession of the small copyhold property of Varfell, to which reference has already been made. Robert, although a person of some capacity, seems to have been shiftless, thriftless, and lax in habits. In his youth he had been taught wood-carving, and specimens of his skill are still to be seen in and about Penzance. But he practised his art in an irregular fashion, his energies being mainly spent in field sports, in unsuccessful experiments in farming, and in hazardous, and for the most part fruitless, ventures in mining. At his death, which occurred when he was forty-eight, his affairs were found to be sadly embarrassed; his widow and five children were left in very straitened circumstances, and Varfell had to be given up. Fortunately for the children, the mother possessed the qualities which the father lacked. Casting about for the means of bringing up and educating her family, By prudence, good management, and the forbearance of creditors, she not only succeeded in rearing and educating her children, but gradually liquidated the whole of her husband’s debts. Some years later, by an unexpected stroke of fortune, she was able to relinquish her business. She lived to a good old age, cheerful and serene, happy in the respect and affection of her children and in the esteem and regard of her townspeople. Such a woman could not fail to exercise a strong and lasting influence for good on her children. That it powerfully affected the character of her son Humphry, he would have been the first to admit. Nothing in him was more remarkable or more beautiful than his strong and abiding love for his mother. No matter how immersed he was in his own affairs, he could always find time amidst the whirl and excitement of his London life, amidst the worry and anxiety of official cares—or, when abroad, among the peaks of the Noric Alps or the ruins of Italian cities—to think of his far-away Cornish home and of her round whom it was centred. To the last he opened out his heart to her as he did to none other; she shared in all his aspirations, and lived with him through his triumphs; and by her death, just a year before his own, she was happily spared the knowledge of his physical decay and approaching end. * * * * * Davy was about sixteen years of age when his father died. At that time he was a bright, curly-haired, hazel-eyed lad, somewhat narrow-chested and undergrown, awkward in manner and gait, but keenly fond Dr. Cardew, of the Truro Grammar School, where, by the kindness of the Tonkins, he spent the year preceding his father’s death, wrote of him that he did not at that time discover any extraordinary abilities, or, so far as could be observed, any propensity to those scientific pursuits which raised him to such eminence. “His best exercises were translations from the classics into English verse.” He had previously spent nine years in the Penzance Grammar School under the tyranny of the Rev. Mr. Coryton, a man of irregular habits and as deficient in good method as in scholarship. As Davy used to come up for the customary castigation, the worthy follower of Orbilius was wont to repeat— “Now, Master Davy, Now, sir! I have ’ee No one shall save ’ee— Good Master Davy!” He had, too, an unpleasant habit of pulling the boys’ ears, on the supposition, apparently, that their receptivity for oral instruction was thereby stimulated. It is recorded that on one occasion Davy appeared before him with a large plaster on each ear, explaining, with a very grave face, that he had “put the plasters on to prevent mortification.” Whence it may be inferred that, in spite of all the caning and the ear-pulling, there was still much of the unregenerate Adam left in “good Master Davy.” Mr. Coryton’s method of inculcating knowledge and the love of learning, happily, had no permanent ill-effect on the boy. Years afterwards, when reflecting on his school-life, he wrote, in a letter to his mother—
If Davy’s abilities were not perceived by his masters, they seemed to have been fully recognised by his school-fellows—to judge from the frequency with which they sought his aid in their Latin compositions, and from the fact that half the love-sick youths of Penzance employed him to write their valentines and letters. His lively imagination, strong dramatic power, and retentive memory combined to make him a good story-teller, and many an evening was spent by his comrades beneath the balcony of the Star Inn, in Market Jew Street, listening to his tales of wonder or horror, gathered from the “Arabian Nights” or from his grandmother Davy, a woman of fervid mind stored with traditions and ancient legends, from whom he seems to have derived much of his poetic instinct. Those who would search in environment for the conditions which determine mental aptitudes, will find it very difficult to ascertain what there was in Davy’s boyish life in Penzance to mould him into a natural philosopher. At school he seems to have acquired nothing beyond a smattering of elementary mathematics and a certain facility in turning Latin into English verse. Most of what he obtained in the way of general knowledge he picked up for himself, from such books as he found in the library of his benefactor, Mr. John Tonkin. Dr. John Davy has left us a sketch of the state of society in the Mount’s Bay during the latter part of the eighteenth century, which serves to show how unfavourable
Davy, an ardent, impulsive youth of strong social instincts, fond of excitement, and not over studious, seems, now that he was released from the restraint of school-life, to have come under the influence of such surroundings. For nearly a year he was restless and unsettled, spending much of his time like his father in rambling about the country and in fishing and shooting, and passing from desultory study to occasional dissipation. The death of his father, however, made a profound impression on his mind, and suddenly changed the whole course of his conduct. As the eldest son, and approaching manhood, he seems at once to have realised what was due to his mother and to himself. The circumstances of the family supplied the stimulus 1. Theology, 2. Geography. 3. My Profession. 4. Logic. 5. Languages. 6. Physics. 7. Mechanics. 8. Rhetoric and Oratory. 9. History and Chronology. 10. Mathematics. The note-book opens with “Hints Towards the Investigation of Truth in Religious and Political Opinions, composed as they occurred, to be placed in a more regular These early essays display the workings of an original mind, intent, it may be, on problems beyond its immature powers, but striving in all sincerity to work out its own thoughts and to arrive at its own conclusions. Of course, the daring youth of sixteen who enters upon an inquiry into the most difficult problems of theology and metaphysics, with, what he is pleased to call, unprejudiced reason as his sole guide, quickly passes into a cold fit of materialism. His mind was too impressionable, however, to have reached the stage of settled convictions; and in the same note-book we subsequently find the heads of a train of argument in favour of a rational religious belief founded on immaterialism. Metaphysical inquiries seem, indeed, to have occupied the greater part of his time at this period; and his note-books show that he made himself acquainted with the writings of Locke, Hartley, Bishop Berkeley, Hume, Helvetius, Condorcet, and Reid, and that he had some knowledge of the doctrines of Kant and the Transcendentalists. That he thought for himself, and was not unduly swayed by authority, is evident from the general tenour of his notes, and from the critical remarks and comments by which they are accompanied. Some of these are worth quoting:—
As his impulsive, ingenuous disposition led him, even to the last, to speak freely of what was uppermost in his mind at the moment, we may be sure that his elders, the Rev. Dr. Tonkin, his good friend John Tonkin, and his grandmother Davy, with whom he was a great favourite, as he was with most old people, must have been considerably exercised at times with the metaphysical disquisitions to which they were treated; and we can well imagine that their patience was occasionally as greatly tried as that of the worthy member of the Society of Friends who wound up an argument with the remark, “I tell thee what, Humphry, thou art the most quibbling hand at a dispute I ever met with in my life.” Whether it was in revenge for this sally that the young disputant composed the “Letter on the Pretended Inspiration of the Quakers” which is to be found in one of his early note-books, does not appear. We easily trace in these early essays the evidences of that facility and charm of expression which a few years later astonished and delighted his audiences at the Royal Institution, and which remained the characteristic features of his literary style. These qualities were in no small degree strengthened by his frequent exercises in poetry. For Davy had early tasted of the Pierian spring, and, like Pope, may be said to have lisped in numbers. At five he was an improvisatore, reciting his rhymes at some Christmas gambols, attired in a fanciful dress prepared by a playful girl who was related to him. That he had the divine gift was acknowledged by no less an authority than Coleridge, who Throughout his life he was wont, when deeply moved, to express his feelings in verse; and at times even his prose was so suffused with the glow of poetry that to some it seemed altiloquent and inflated. Some of his first efforts appeared in the “Annual Anthology,” a work printed in Bristol in 1799, and edited by Southey and Tobin, and interesting to the book-hunter as one of the first of the literary “Annuals” which subsequently became so fashionable. Davy had an intense love of Nature, and nothing stirred the poetic fire within him more than the sight of some sublime natural object such as a storm-beaten cliff, a mighty mountain, a resistless torrent, or some spectacle which recalled the power and majesty of the sea. Not that he was insensible to the simpler charms of pastoral beauty, or incapable of sympathy with Nature in her softest, tenderest moods. But these things never seemed to move him as did some scene of grandeur, or some manifestation of stupendous natural energy. The following lines, written on Fair Head during the summer of 1806, may serve as an example of how scenery when associated in his mind with the sentiments of dignity or strength affected him:— “Majestic Cliff! Thou birth of unknown time, Long had the billows beat thee, long the waves Rush’d o’er thy hollow’d rocks, ere life adorn’d Thy broken surface, ere the yellow moss Had tinted thee, or the wild dews of heaven Clothed thee with verdure, or the eagles made Thy caves their aËry. So in after time Long shalt thou rest unalter’d mid the wreck Of all the mightiness of human works; For not the lightning, nor the whirlwind’s force, Nor all the waves of ocean, shall prevail Against thy giant strength, and thou shalt stand Till the Almighty voice which bade thee rise Shall bid thee fall.” In spite of a love-passage which seems to have provoked a succession of sonnets, his devotions to Calliope were by no means so unremitting as to prevent him from following the plan of study he had marked out for himself. His note-books show that in the early part of 1796 he attacked the mathematics, and with such ardour that in little more than a year he had worked through a course of what he called “Mathematical Rudiments,” in which he included “fractions, vulgar and decimal; extraction of roots; algebra (as far as quadratic equations); Euclid’s elements of geometry; trigonometry; logarithms; sines and tangents; tables; application of algebra to geometry, etc.” In 1797 he began the study of natural philosophy, and towards the end of this year, when he was close on nineteen, he turned his attention to chemistry, merely, however, at the outset as a branch of his professional education, and with no other idea than to acquaint himself with its general principles. His good fortune led him to select Lavoisier’s “Elements”—probably Kerr’s translation, published in 1796—as his text-book. No choice could have been happier. The book is well suited From reading and speculation he soon passed to experiment. But at this time he had never seen a chemical operation performed, and had little or no acquaintance with even as much as the forms of chemical apparatus. Phials, wine-glasses, tea-cups, and tobacco-pipes, with an occasional earthen crucible, were all the paraphernalia he could command; the common mineral acids, the alkalis, and a few drugs from the surgery constituted his stock of chemicals. Of the nature of these early trials we know little. It is, however, almost certain that the experiments with sea-weed, described in his two essays “On Heat, Light and the Combinations of Light” and “On the Generation of Phosoxygen and the Causes of the Colours of Organic Beings” (see p. 30), were made at this time, and it is highly probable that the experiments on land-plants, which are directly related to those on the Fuci and are described in connection with them, were made at the same period. That he pursued his experiments with characteristic ardour is borne out by the testimony of members of his family, particularly by that of his sister, who sometimes acted as his assistant, and whose dress too frequently suffered from the corrosive action of his chemicals. The good Mr. Tonkin and his worthy brother, the Reverend Doctor, were also from time to time abruptly and unexpectedly made aware of his zeal. “This boy Humphry is incorrigible! He will blow us all into the air!” were occasional exclamations heard to follow the alarming noises which now and then proceeded from the laboratory. The well-known anecdote of the syringe which had formed part Two or three circumstances conduced to develop Davy’s taste for scientific pursuits, and to extend his opportunities for observation and experiment. One was his acquaintance with Mr. Gregory Watt; another was his introduction to Mr. Davies Gilbert (then Mr. Davies Giddy), a Cornish gentleman of wealth and position, who lived to succeed him in the presidential chair of the Royal Society. Gregory Watt, the son of James Watt, the engineer, by his second marriage, was a young man of singular promise who, had he lived, would—if we may judge from his paper in the Philosophical Transactions—have almost certainly acquired a distinguished position in science. Of a weakly, consumptive habit, he was ordered to spend the winter of 1797 in Penzance, where he lodged with Mrs. Davy, boarding with the family. Young Watt was about two years older than Davy, and had just left the University of Glasgow, “his mind enriched beyond his age with science and literature, with a spirit above the little vanities and distinctions of the world, devoted to the acquisition of knowledge.” He remained in Penzance until the following spring, and by his example, and by the generous friendship which he extended towards him, he developed and strengthened
Mr. Gilbert was thus led to interest himself in the boy, whom he invited to his house at Tredrea, offering him the use of his library, and such other assistance in his studies as he could render. On one occasion he was taken over to the Hayle Copper-House, and had the opportunity of seeing a well-appointed laboratory:
Dr. Thomas Beddoes was by training a medical man, who in various ways had striven to make a name for himself in science. He is known to the chemical bibliographer as the translator of the Chemical Essays of Scheele, and at one time occupied the Chair of Chemistry at Oxford. The geological world at the end of the eighteenth century regarded him as a zealous and uncompromising Plutonist. His character was thus described by Davy, who in the last year of his life jotted down, in the form of brief notes, his reminiscences of some of the more remarkable men of his acquaintance:—
One of Dr. Beddoes’s “scientific aberrations” was the inception and establishment of the Pneumatic Institution, which he founded with a view of studying the medicinal effects of the different gases, in the sanguine hope that powerful remedies might be found amongst them. The Institution, which was supported wholly by subscription, was to be provided with all the means likely to promote In seeking for a person to take charge of the laboratory, Dr. Beddoes bethought him of Davy, who had been recommended to him by Mr. Gilbert. In a letter dated July 4th, 1798, Dr. Beddoes thus writes to Mr. Gilbert:—
A fortnight later, Dr. Beddoes again wrote to Mr. Gilbert:—
Thanks to Mr. Gilbert, the negotiation was brought to a successful issue. Mrs. Davy yielded to her son’s wishes, and Mr. Borlase surrendered his indenture, on the back of which he wrote that he released him from “all engagements whatever on account of his excellent behaviour”; adding, “because being a youth of great promise, I would not obstruct his present pursuits, which are likely to promote his fortune and his fame.” The only one of his friends who disapproved of the scheme was his old benefactor, Mr. John Tonkin, who had hoped to have established Davy in his native town as a surgeon. Mr. Tonkin was so irritated at the failure of his plans that he altered his will, and revoked the legacy of his house, which he had bequeathed to him. |