l counts: first, because he was an
accomplished fisherman and the author of "Salmonia," and next, because
he was the first scientific man of any repute who was formally invited
by a Board of Agriculture to discuss the relations of Chemistry to the
practice of farming.

Unfortunately, he was himself ignorant of practical agriculture,[28]
when called upon to illustrate its relations to chemistry; but, like an
earnest man, he set about informing himself by communication with the
best farmers of the kingdom. He delivered a very admirable series of
lectures, and it was without doubt most agreeable to the
country-gentlemen to find the great waste from their fermenting manures
made clear by Sir Humphry's retorts; but Davy was too profound and too
honest a man to lay down for farmers any chemical high-road to success.
He directed and stimulated inquiry; he developed many of the principles
which underlay their best practice; but he offered them no safety-lamp.
I think he brought more zeal to his investigations in the domain of pure
science; he loved well-defined and brilliant results; and I do not think
that he pushed his inquiries in regard to the way in which the
forage-plants availed themselves of sulphate of lime with one-half the
earnestness or delight with which he conducted his discovery of the
integral character of chlorine, or with which he saw for the first time
the metallic globules bubbling out from the electrified crust of potash.

Yet he loved the country with a rare and thorough love, as his
descriptions throughout his letters prove; and he delighted in straying
away, in the leafy month of June, to the charming place of his friend
Knight, upon the Teme in Herefordshire. His "Salmonia" is, in its way, a
pastoral; not, certainly, to be compared with the original of Walton,
lacking its simple homeliness, for which its superior scientific
accuracy can make but poor amends. I cannot altogether forget, in
reading it, that its author is a fine gentleman from London. Neither
fish, nor alders, nor eddies, nor purling shallows, can drive out of
memory the fact that Sir Humphry must be back at "The Hall" by half-past
six, in season to dress for dinner. Walton, in slouch-hat, bound about
with "leaders," sat upon the green turf to listen to a milkmaid's song.
Sir Humphry (I think he must have carried a camp-stool) recited some
verses written by "a noble lady long distinguished at court."[29]

In fact, there was always a grea