tory, and assistant-editor of the journals of the Royal
Institution. His first remuneration was a room in the house, coals and
candles, and 100 pounds a year. Count Rumford held out the prospect of a
professorship with 300 pounds a year, and the certainty of full support
in the use of the laboratory for his own private research. His age then
was twenty-three. He at once satisfied men of science and amused people
of fashion. His energy was unbounded; there was a fascination in his
personal character and manner. He was a genial and delightful lecturer,
and his inventive genius was continually finding something new. A first
suggestion of the process of photography was dropped incidentally among
the records of researches that attracted more attention. Davy had been
little more than a year at the Royal Institution when he was made its
Professor of Chemistry. After another year he was made a Fellow. Dr.
Paris, his biographer, says that "the enthusiastic admiration which his
lectures obtained is at this period scarcely to be imagined. Men of the
first rank and talent--the literary and the scientific, the practical,
the theoretical--blue-stockings and women of fashion, the old and the
young, all crowded--eagerly crowded--the lecture-room." At the beginning
of the year 1805 his salary was raised to 400 pounds a year. In May of
that year the Royal Society awarded to him the Copley Medal. Within the
next two years he was elected Secretary of the Royal Society. Since 1800
he had been advancing knowledge by experiments with galvanism. The Royal
Institution raised a special fund to place at his disposal a more
powerful galvanic battery than any that had been constructed. The fame
of his discoveries spread over Europe.

The Institute of France gave Davy the Napoleon Prize of three thousand
francs for the best experiments in galvanism. Dublin, in 1810, paid Davy
four hundred guineas for some lectures upon his discoveries. The Farming
Society of Ireland gave him 750 pounds for six lectures on chemistry
applied to agriculture. In the following year he received more than a
thousand pounds for two courses of lectures at Dublin, and was sent home
with the honorary degree of LL.D. In April, 1812, he was knighted,
resigned his professorship at the Royal Institution, and "in order more
strongly to mark the high sense of his merits" he was elected Honorary
Professor of Chemistry. In the same month Davy married a young and ri