“This day they were accompanied by an illustrious philosopher [Davy], who was also a true poet—and might have been one of the greatest of poets had he chosen; and I have heard Mr. Wordsworth say, that it would be difficult to express the feelings with which he, who so often had climbed Helvellyn alone, found himself standing on its summit with two such men as Scott and Davy.”
But the greater part of this summer he spent in the north of Ireland, examining the extraordinary geological features of that district. Lady Brownrigg, the sister of the Bishop of Raphoe, has given a spirited little account of her impressions of his appearance and manner at that period. She was, she says, very young at the time.
“We had been invited (I say we, for I was then with the Bishop of Raphoe) by Dr. Richardson to go to his cottage at Portrush, ‘to meet the famous Mr. Davy.’ We arrived a short time before dinner. In passing through a room we saw a youth, as he appeared, who had come in from fishing, and who, with a little note-book, was seated in a window-seat, having left a bag, rod &c., on the ground. He was very intent upon this little book, and we passed through unnoticed. We shook hands with our host and hostess, and prepared for dinner. I went into the drawing-room, under some little awe of this great philosopher, annexing to such a character at least the idea of an elderly grave gentleman, not perhaps, with so large a wig as Dr. Parr, or so sententious a manner as Dr. Johnson,—but certainly I never calculated on being introduced to the identical youth, with a little brown head, like a boy, that we had seen with his book, and who, when I came into the drawing-room was in the most animated manner recounting an adventure on the Causeway which had entertained him and from his manner of telling it was causing loud laughing in the whole room.”
Davy also spent much of the summer of 1806 in Ireland, and the journal which he kept during his tour contains many interesting notes of his impressions of the country and the people. In the course of his journey he visited Edgeworthstown—“the moral and intellectual paradise of the author of ‘Castle Rackrent,’” as he calls it. That gifted lady tells her cousin Sophy Ruxton that as the result her head “was stuffed full of geological and chemical facts.” “Mr. Davy,” she adds, “is wonderfully improved since you saw him at Bristol; he has an amazing fund of knowledge upon all subjects, and a great deal of genius.”
There was much in Davy’s own temperament to make him understand and appreciate the Irish character; himself a man of quick impulse and active sympathy, he was profoundly moved by the spectacle of Ireland’s political degradation. In a letter to his friend Poole, written after his return to London, he says:—
“I long very much for the intercourse of a week with you: I have very much to say about Ireland. It is an island which might be made a new and a great country. It now boasts a fertile soil, an ingenious and robust peasantry, and a rich aristocracy; but the bane of the nation is the equality of poverty amongst the lower orders. All are slaves, without the probability of becoming free; they are in the state of equality which the sans culottes wished for in France; and until emulation, and riches, and the love of clothes and neat houses are introduced among them, there will be no permanent improvement.
“Changes in political institutions can, at first, do little towards serving them; it must be by altering their habits, by diffusing manufactories, by destroying middlemen, by dividing farms, and by promoting industry by making the pay proportional to the work: but I ought not to attempt to say anything on the subject when my limits are so narrow; I hope soon to converse with you about it.”
With the exception of a rapid journey into Cornwall, for the sake of seeing his family, he spent the greater part of the summer and autumn of 1807 in town. He had been made Secretary of the Royal Society in succession to Gray, and was obliged to be in or near London in order to see the Philosophical Transactions through the press. From the Laboratory Journal it would appear that he was occupied at this time on a variety of disconnected investigations such as the nature of Antwerp Blue, and the effect of electricity on flame. In a letter to Davies Gilbert, dated September 12th, he states that he has been a good deal engaged in experiments on distillation for revenue purposes.
Towards the end of this month, or during the first week of October, he resumed his experiments with the voltaic battery, and he was led to study its action on the alkalis. There is some evidence that he had attacked the same question at Bristol. In a note-book of that period, under date August 6th, 1800, is the following sentence: “I cannot close this notice without feeling grateful to M. Volta, Mr. Nicholson, and Mr. Carlisle, whose experience has placed such a wonderful and important instrument of analysis in my power”—evidently a jotting to be used in one of the short communications to Nicholson’s Journal. This is immediately followed by “Query: Would not potash, dissolved in spirits of wine, become a conductor?” And he then gives an account of some experiments on the action of voltaic electricity on aqueous solutions of ammonia, caustic potash, and hydrochloric acid, which apparently led to the same result as that already obtained by Nicholson and Carlisle in the case of water.
It is difficult to determine whether he had any precise idea in again attacking the problem, or any expectation of a definite result. In one of his lectures at the Royal Institution on Electro-Chemical Science, delivered some time subsequently, he said he had a suspicion at that time that potash might turn out to be “phosphorus, or sulphur united to nitrogen”:
“For as the volatile alkali was regarded as composed of an extremely light inflammable body—hydrogen—united to nitrogen, I conceived that phosphorus and sulphur, much denser bodies, might produce denser alkaline matter; and as there were no known combination of these with nitrogen, it was probable that there might be unknown combinations.”