His mother apprenticed him to a surgeon and apothecary in Penzance, and straightway with that ardour and enthusiasm that carried him through so much of his great work in later life, he fell in love with chemistry. He tried boyish experiments. He used the rudest instruments—anything that he could lay hands on. Pots, pans, vessels in the surgery—nothing was safe or sacred from his touch. He filled the house with strange and hideous odours—he burnt holes in his sister’s dresses. When he turned the garret into a laboratory his good old guardian would exclaim—
“This boy Humphrey is incorrigible! Was there ever so idle a dog? He will blow us all into the air.”
Half an hour later he would proudly and fondly call the boy “Philosopher,” or “Sir Humphrey,” as if already his prophetic eye pierced the future and beheld his greatness.
So he spent much of the day, and in the long summer evenings he would ramble along the seashore as far as Marazion armed with a hammer with which to chip off “specimens” from the rocks, for already geology had thrown over him its peculiar spell. He would end these happy days with tea at a favourite aunt’s. And it was not merely boyish enjoyment these solitary rambles brought. They and the still small voice of Nature were telling on him. Gradually they were making and moulding the boy, approaching now as he was, very near to the threshold of manhood.
Even then, however, he was trying to improve himself. With the roar of the waves and the howl of the winds in his ears in these lonely walks, he would declaim to the elements, in the hope of softening a defect in his voice. This probably arose from his having what is called “no ear.” He had no notion of either time or tune. It used to trouble him much that he never could keep step in the Volunteer Infantry corps to which he belonged, and someone tried to teach him “God Save the King,” but without success.
The surgical part of his profession was always disagreeable and distasteful to the boy, although from no want of courage on his part. The story goes that one day about this time he was bitten in the leg by a dog supposed to be mad. No sooner did he realise what had happened to him than he there and then took a knife and cut the piece right out of his leg, and then went to the surgery and had the wound cauterised.
His mind was such that it instinctively rose to emergencies and grappled with anything—a big thing or a little thing. Both were to him alike. Knowledge was what he wanted. He wanted to know as much as possible, and he liked to get to the bottom of a difficulty for himself. Into each new thing that came his way he threw himself with all the ardour and impetuosity of his nature. Nor was he merely practical and nothing more. He had that sympathy and delicacy of mind that revelled in communing with nature. This expressed itself in sonnets and poems—some of which he wrote when he was only twelve. A great poetic genius once said of him—
“If Davy had not been the first chemist he would have been the first poet of his age.”
But poetry was not the field in which he was to shine. His genius was for experiments. He went on eagerly experimenting on anything—heat, light, air. Anything connected with chemistry drew him as with a magnet. The first time some real experimenting apparatus found its way to his hands he could not conceal his delight. Specially did an air-pump charm him. It was to him as a new and fascinating toy to a child. He kept working the piston up and down, and would hardly let it go!
And now it seemed as if it were almost time for him to try his wings in the larger air of the great world. More than one man had come to Penzance who perhaps gave the boy a foretaste of the delights he was to know by-and-by as a man in the atmosphere of culture and talent in which his lot was to be cast. Among these were Josiah Wedgwood, the Staffordshire Potter, and young Watt, the son of the inventor of the Condensing Steam Engine.