In 1818, when he was created a baronet, he was commissioned by the British government to examine the papyri of Herculaneum in the Neapolitan museum, and he did not arrive back in England till June 1820. In November of that year the Royal Society, of which he had become a fellow in 1803, and acted as secretary from 1807 to 1812, chose him as their president, but his personal qualities were not such as to make him very successful in that office, especially in comparison with the tact and firmness of his predecessor, Sir Joseph Banks. In 1821 he was busy with electrical experiments and in 1822 with investigations of the fluids contained in the cavities of crystals in rocks. In 1823, when Faraday liquefied chlorine, he read a paper which suggested the application of liquids formed by the condensation of gases as mechanical agents. In the same year the admiralty consulted the Royal Society as to a means of preserving the copper sheathing of ships from corrosion and keeping it smooth, and he suggested that the copper would be preserved if it were rendered negatively electrical, as would be done by fixing “protectors” of zinc to the sheeting. This method was tried on several ships, but it was found that the bottoms became extremely foul from accumulations of seaweed and shellfish. For this reason the admiralty decided against the plan, much to the inventor’s annoyance, especially as orders to remove the protectors already fitted were issued in June 1825, immediately after he had announced to the Royal Society the full success of his remedy.
In 1826 Davy’s health, which showed signs of failure in 1823, had so declined that he could with difficulty indulge in his favourite sports of fishing and shooting, and early in 1827, after a slight attack of paralysis, he was ordered abroad. After a short stay at Ravenna he removed to Salzburg, whence, his illness continuing, he sent in his resignation as president of the Royal Society. In the autumn he returned to England and spent his time in writing his Salmonia or Days of Flyfishing, an imitation of The Compleat Angler. In the spring of 1828 he again left England for Illyria, and in the winter fixed his residence at Rome, whence he sent to the Royal Society his “Remarks on the Electricity of the Torpedo,” written at Trieste in October. This, with the exception of a posthumous work, Consolations in Travel, or the Last Days of a Philosopher (1830), was the final production of his pen. On the 20th of February 1829 he suffered a second attack of paralysis which rendered his right side quite powerless, but under the care of his brother, Dr John Davy (1791-1868), he rallied sufficiently to be removed to Geneva, where he died on the 29th of May.
Of a sanguine, somewhat irritable temperament, Davy displayed characteristic enthusiasm and energy in all his pursuits. As is shown by his verses and sometimes by his prose, his mind was highly imaginative; the poet Coleridge declared that if he “had not been the first chemist, he would have been the first poet of his age,” and Southey said that “he had all the elements of a poet; he only wanted the art.” In spite of his ungainly exterior and peculiar manner, his happy gifts of exposition and illustration won him extraordinary popularity as a lecturer, his experiments were ingenious and rapidly performed, and Coleridge went to hear him “to increase his stock of metaphors.” The dominating ambition of his life was to achieve fame, but though that sometimes betrayed him into petty jealousy, it did not leave him insensible to the claims on his knowledge of the “cause of humanity,” to use a phrase often employed by him in connexion with his invention of the miners’ lamp. Of the smaller observances of etiquette he was careless, and his frankness of disposition sometimes exposed him to annoyances which he might have avoided by the exercise of ordinary tact.
See Dr J. A. Paris, The Life of Sir Humphry Davy (1831), vol. ii. of which on pp. 450-456 gives a list of his publications. Dr John Davy, Memoirs of Sir Humphry Davy (1836); Collected Works (with shorter memoir, 1839); Fragmentary Remains, Literary and Scientific (1858). T. E. Thorpe, Humphry Davy, Poet and Philosopher (1896).
[1] Edmund Davy (1785-1857) became professor of chemistry at Cork Institution in 1813, and at the Royal Dublin Society in 1826. His son, Edmund William Davy (born in 1826), was appointed professor of medicine in the Royal College, Dublin, in 1870.
[2] Davy’s will directed that this service, after Lady Davy’s death, should pass to his brother, Dr John Davy, on whose decease, if he had no heirs who could make use of it, it was to be melted and sold, the proceeds going to the Royal Society “to found a medal to be given annually for the most important discovery in chemistry anywhere made in Europe or Anglo-America.” The silver produced £736, and the interest on that sum is expended on the Davy medal, which was awarded for the first time in 1877, to Bunsen and Kirchhoff for their discovery of spectrum analysis.
DAWARI, or Dauri, a Pathan tribe on the Waziri border of the North-West Frontier Province of India. The Dawaris inhabit the Tochi Valley (q.v.), otherwise known as Dawar or Daur, and are a homogeneous tribe of considerable size, numbering 5200 fighting men. Though surrounded on all four sides by a Waziri population they bear little resemblance to Waziris. They are an agricultural and the Waziris a pastoral race, and they are much richer than their neighbours. They thrive on a rich sedimentary soil copiously irrigated in the midst of a country where cultivable land of any kind is scarce and water in general hardly to be obtained. But they pay a heavy tax in health and well-being for the possession of their fertile acres. Fevers and other ravaging diseases are bred in the wet sodden lands of the Tochi Valley, lying at the bottom of a deep depression exposed to the burning rays of the sun; and the effects of these ailments may be clearly traced in the drawn or bloated features and the shrunken or swollen limbs of nearly every Dawari that has passed middle life. They have an evil name for indolence, drug-eating and unnatural vices, and are morally the lowest of the Afghan races; but in spite of these defects, and of the contempt with which they are regarded by the other Afghan tribes, they have held their own for centuries against the warlike and hardy Waziris. The secret of this is that the Dawaris stand together, and the Waziris do not, while the weaker race is gifted with infinite patience and tenacity of purpose. With the advent of British government, however, the Dawaris are now secured in the possession of their ancestral lands.
See J. G. Lorimer, Grammar and Vocabulary of Waziri Pushtu (1902).