The Project Gutenberg eBook, Consolations in Travel, by Humphrey Davy,
Edited by Henry Morley

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Title: Consolations in Travel
or, the Last Days of a Philosopher

Author: Humphrey Davy

Editor: Henry Morley

Release Date: February 28, 2006 [eBook #17882]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONSOLATIONS IN TRAVEL***

Transcribed from the 1889 Cassell & Company edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

CONSOLATIONS IN TRAVEL;
OR, THE LAST DAYS OF A PHILOSOPHER.

BY SIR HUMPHRY DAVY, BART.,
_Late President of the Royal Society_.

CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:
_LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_. 1889

INTRODUCTION.

Humphry Davy was born at Penzance, in Cornwall, on the 17th of December,
1778, and died at Geneva on the 29th of May, 1829, at the age of fifty.
He was a philosopher who turned knowledge to wisdom; he was one of the
foremost of our English men of science; and this book, written when he
was dying, which makes Reason the companion of Faith, shows how he passed
through the light of earth into the light of heaven.

His father had a small patrimony at Varfell, in Ludgvan. His mother had
lost in early childhood both her parents within a few hours of each
other, and had been adopted by John Tonkin, an eminent surgeon in
Penzance, to whom, therefore, so to speak, Humphry Davy became grandson
by adoption. There were five such grandchildren--Humphry, the elder of
two boys, the other boy being named John, and three girls.

At a preparatory school and at the Penzance Grammar School Humphry Davy
was a noticeable boy. He read eagerly and showed great quickness of
imagination, delighted in legends, when eight years old told stories to
his companions, and as a boy wrote verse. There was a Quaker saddler who
made for himself an electrical machine and mechanical models, in which
young Davy took keen interest, and from that saddler, Robert Dunkin, came
the first impulse towards experiments in science. At fifteen Davy was
placed for further education at a school in Truro. A year later his
father died, and John Tonkin apprenticed h