‘The basis of potash serves almost as an accurate indication of the proportion of oxygene in bodies and exactly in proportion—camphor, spermaceti, wax, volatile oils.
‘In the course of my inquiries many circumstances arose at first anomalous, but which soon were capable of being explained, and which, when understood, seemed to extend the general facts which had been detailed.’
A long break here occurs in the Laboratory Notes. On November 23, 1807, Davy was taken ill with fever.
On December 7 the Managers’ Minutes say, ‘Mr. Davy having been confined to his bed for the last fortnight by a severe illness, the managers are under the painful necessity of giving notice that the lectures will not commence until the first week in January next.’
On January 18 the managers of the Royal Institution ordered 500 copies of the following paper to be printed:
NEW DISCOVERY IN CHEMISTRY.
January 18, 1808.
For the satisfaction of those proprietors who were not present at the opening of the Rev. Mr. Dibden’s introductory lecture on Wednesday last the managers have obtained and printed the following note of it:
‘Before I solicit your attention to the opening of those lectures which I shall have the honour of delivering in the course of the season, permit me to trespass upon it for a few minutes by stating the peculiar circumstances under which this Institution is now again opened, and how it comes to pass that it has fallen to me rather than to a more deserving lecturer to be the first to address you.
‘The managers of this Institution have directed me to impart to you that intelligence which no one who is alive to the best feelings of human nature can hear without the mixed emotions of sorrow and delight.
‘Mr. Davy, whose frequent and powerful addresses from this place, supported by his ingenious experiments, have been so long and so well known to you, has for the last five weeks been struggling between life and death. The effects of those experiments recently made in illustration of his late splendid discovery, added to consequent bodily weakness, brought on a fever so violent as to threaten the extinction of life. Over him it might emphatically be said, in the language of the immortal Milton, that—
Death his dart shook, but delayed to strike.
If it had pleased Providence to deprive the world of all further benefit from his original talents and intense application there has certainly been sufficient already effected by him to entitle him to be classed among the brightest scientific luminaries of his country. That this may not appear to be unfounded eulogium I shall proceed, at the particular request of the managers, to give you an outline of the splendid discovery just alluded to, and I do so with the greater pleasure as that outline has been drawn in a very masterly manner by a gentleman of all others perhaps the best qualified to do it effectually (Cavendish?)
‘In the course of the last twenty-five or thirty years the science of chemistry has undergone great changes and has been astonishingly augmented by various important discoveries, amongst which the most remarkable have been the decomposition and recomposition of water and of nitric acid, discovered by Mr. Cavendish, and the consequent knowledge of the nature of metallic calces (now called oxides) with that of acids in general.
‘But although the two fixed alkalies called soda and potash were attacked by the most eminent chemists with every known chemical agent and by every method which the improved state of science could suggest, not the smallest effect could be produced on them; so that the nature of these two common substances remained totally unascertained and became a grand desideratum of chemical science. When, however, M. Volta had communicated to the Royal Society his great discovery of the galvanic pile, and when this had been modified into the more convenient form of troughs by Crookshank of Woolwich, the electro-galvanic power was found by various philosophers to produce surprising effects when applied to different substances, and Mr. Davy in particular distinguished himself in these researches and made a number of valuable experiments and observations, some of the more remarkable of which he communicated to the Royal Society in the Bakerian lecture read in November 1806. Mr. Davy conceived, however, from what he had then accomplished, that much more might be done; and with equal skill and perseverance he performed a new series of experiments, in the course of which, by various means, he again tried the effect of the powerful galvanic batteries belonging to the laboratory of the Royal Institution, and particularly devoted his attention to the two fixed alkalies (soda and potash), with the view of effecting their decomposition and of ascertaining the nature of them by means of that powerful agent galvanism.
‘This great discovery he at length effected; and, to the high gratification of all men of science, he proved that soda and potash are compound bodies, each consisting of a peculiar metal, which has so great a tendency to combine with oxygen that no agent but galvanism can separate them. The two metals, therefore, of soda and potash have always hitherto been presented to us in this state of combination with oxygen, forming the two alkalies. But some of the primitive earths (as they are called), such as barytes and strontites, have many alkaline properties, which induced Mr. Davy to subject them to similar experiments; and in like manner he discovered that these consisted of metallic bases united to oxygen, forming compound bodies analogous to the two fixed alkalies. These may justly be placed amongst the most brilliant and valuable discoveries which have ever been made in chemistry, for a great chasm in the chemical system has been filled up; a blaze of light has been diffused over that part which before was utterly dark; and new views have been opened so numerous and interesting that the more any man who is versed in chemistry reflects on them, the more he finds to admire and to heighten his expectation of future important results. Mr. Davy’s name, in consequence of these discoveries, will be always recorded in the annals of science amongst those of the most illustrious philosophers of his time. His country, with reason, will be proud of him; and it is no small honour to the Royal Institution that these great discoveries have been made within its walls, in that laboratory and by those instruments which, from the zeal of promoting useful knowledge, have with so much propriety been placed at the disposal and for the use of the Professor of Chemistry.
‘This recital [said Dr. Dibden] will be sufficient to convince those who hear of the celebrity which the author of such a discovery has a right to attach to himself; and yet no one, I am confident, has less inclination to challenge it. To us and to every enlightened Englishman it will be a matter of just congratulation that the country which has produced the two Bacons and Boyle has in these days shown itself worthy of its former renown by the labours of Cavendish and Davy.
‘The illness of the latter, severe as it has been, is now beginning to abate,[35] and we may reasonably hope, from present appearances at least, that the period of convalescence is not very remote.’[36]
The recovery of Davy was slow.
On February 22 he attended at the request of the Committee of Managers, and informed them that he should be able to commence his course of lectures on Electro-Chemical Science on Saturday, March 12, at two o’clock, and those on Geology on Wednesday evening, the sixteenth of that month. In his opening lecture he thus spoke of electro-chemistry and its power of analysis: ‘In this it will be seen that Volta has presented to us a key which promises to lay open some of the most mysterious recesses of nature. Till this discovery our means were limited; the field of pneumatic research had been exhausted, and little remained for the experimentalist except minute and laborious processes. There is now before us a boundless prospect of novelty in science, a country unexplored but noble and fertile in aspect, a land of promise in philosophy.’
In the Laboratory Book, probably about this time, he wrote, ‘An instrument for procuring those metals that have not yet been reduced—for decomposing muriatic acid gas, fluoric, &c., and boracic acid gas.’