"All honor to him who shall win the prize,"
The world has cried for a thousand years,
But to him who tries and who fails and dies
I give great honor and glory and tears.
Give glory and honor and pitiful tears
To all who fail in their deeds sublime,
Their ghosts are many in the van of years,
They were born with Time in advance of Time.
Oh, great is the hero who wins a name,
But greater many and many a time
Some pale-faced fellow who dies in shame
And lets God finish the thought sublime.
And great is the man with a sword undrawn,
And good is the man who refrains from wine;
But the man who fails and yet still fights on,
Lo, he is the twin-born brother of mine.
—Joaquin Miller.
A SINGULAR PHILOSOPHER.
Hon. Henry Cavendish was born in England, Oct. 10, 1731, and died Feb. 21, 1810. Cavendish was the son of Lord Charles Cavendish, a son of the Duke of Devonshire; and his mother was Lady Anne Grey, daughter of Henry, Duke of Kent. It is thus seen that the subject of this sketch belonged to two of the two most aristocratic, noble families in England, having for grandfathers the Dukes of Kent and Devonshire. This man, who became one of the most distinguished chemists and physicists of the age, born in high life, of exalted position and wealth, passed through the period of his boyhood and early manhood in utter obscurity, and a dense cloud rests upon his early life. Indeed, the place of his birth has been in dispute; some of his biographers asserting that he was born in England, others that he was born in France or Italy. It is now known that he was born at Nice, whither his mother had gone for the sake of health.
It seems incredible that one highly distinguished, who lived and died so recently, should have almost entirely escaped observation until he had reached middle life. From fragments of his early history which have been collected, we learn that he was a peculiar boy,—shy, reticent, fond of solitary walks, without playfellows, and utterly insensible to the attractions of home and social life. He was born with inflexible reserve; and the love of retirement so manifest in in later life mastered all his instincts even when a boy. If he had been of poor and obscure parentage, it would not seem so strange that one who for nearly fifty years was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and for a lengthened period a member of the Institute of France, and an object of European interest to men of science, had no one to record the incidents of his early life. But he lost his mother when almost an infant, and this sad event probably influenced greatly his early career, and isolated him from the world in which he lived.
We find him at Dr. Newcome's school at Hackney in 1742, and from this school he went directly to Cambridge, where he remained until 1753. He did not graduate, true to his odd instincts, although he spent the full period for a degree at Cambridge. No records of his college life have been preserved, and, as he went to London, it is wonderful that the next ten years of his life remain a blank. He joined the Royal Society in 1760, but contributed nothing until 1766, when he published his first paper on "Factitious Airs." Cavendish was a great mathematician, electrician, astronomer, meteorologist, and as a chemist he was equally learned and original. He lived at a time when science was to a large extent but blank empiricism; even the philosophy of combustion was based on erroneous and absurd hypotheses, and the speculation of experimenters were wild and fantastic. He was the first to submit these speculations to crucial tests, to careful and accurate experiment; and the results which were given to the world introduced a new era in scientific knowledge. We have so much to say regarding the man, that we can only present a brief outline of his great discoveries. Alone, in a spacious house on Clapham Common, outside of London, did this singular man work through many long years, until he filled it with every possible device capable of unfolding or illustrating principles in science.