s
anything but a pleasure to him, and the justice of it does not concern
us; but his repute as an Orientalist is uncontested. Besides works
directly bearing on the Bible, he wrote two important books on _Kinship
and Marriage in Early Arabia_ and on _The Religion of the Semites_. He
was at least as remarkable for general as for special learning, and if
not actually a great man of letters, had a knowledge of literature
rivalled by few of his contemporaries.

To turn to physical science, Sir Humphry Davy, a great chemist and no
mean writer, was born at Penzance in December 1778. His father was a
wood-carver, but he himself was apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary, and
betook himself seriously to chemistry. Fortunately for him, Dr. Beddoes,
the father of the poet, a physician of great repute at Clifton, took him
to be his assistant there, and Davy, in his twentieth year, not only had
much improved opportunities of study, but made valuable friends, both
among the persons of rank who then frequented Clifton for health, and
among the literary society of which Coleridge and Southey were then the
ornaments in Bristol. This part of his sojourn was noteworthy for his
experiments with nitrous oxide ("laughing gas"). These attracted a great
deal of attention, and in 1801, being then barely twenty-three, he was
appointed to a lectureship in the Royal Institution, London. His
appointment was the beginning of a series of brilliant lectures in the
same place during almost the whole of the century, first by Davy
himself, then by his assistant Faraday, and then by Faraday's assistant
Tyndall. He was knighted in 1812, and soon afterwards married Mrs.
Apreece, a lively, pretty, and wealthy widow. His later years were
occupied, first by the investigations which led to the perfecting of
his famous safety-lamp for coal-mines (these brought him a handsome
testimonial and a baronetcy), and later by electrical researches. He had
not reached middle age when his health began to fail, and he died in
1829, aged little more than fifty. In connection with literary science
or scientific literature Davy was perhaps more remarkable as a lecturer
than as a writer, but his accomplishments as the latter were
considerable, and in his later years he wrote two non-scientific books,
_Salmonia_ and _Consolations in Travel_. These (though the former was
attacked as the work of an amateur and a milksop by Christopher North)
were very popular in their day. Davy alway