d
chips in the gas floating over the fermented liquor. He was forty
years old at the time, and knew nothing of chemistry. He consulted
books to ascertain the cause, but they told him little, for as yet
nothing was known on the subject. Then he began to experiment, with
some rude apparatus of his own contrivance. The curious results of
his first experiments led to others, which in his hands shortly
became the science of pneumatic chemistry. About the same time,
Scheele was obscurely working in the same direction in a remote
Swedish village; and he discovered several new gases, with no more
effective apparatus at his command than a few apothecaries' vials and
pigs' bladders.

Sir Humphry Davy, when an apothecary's apprentice, performed his
first experiments with instruments of the rudest description. He
extemporized the greater part of them himself, out of the motley
materials which chance threw in his way--to pots and pans of the
kitchen, and the vials and vessels of his master's surgery. It
happened that a French ship was wrecked off the Land's End, and the
surgeon escaped, bearing with him his case of instruments, amongst
which was an old-fashioned clyster apparatus; this article he
presented to Davy, with whom he had become acquainted. The
apothecary's apprentice received it with great exultation, and
forthwith employed it as a part of a pneumatic apparatus which he
contrived, afterward using it to perform the duties of an air-pump in
one of his experiments on the nature and sources of heat.

In like manner, professor Faraday, Sir Humphry Davy's scientific
successor, made his first experiments in electricity by means of an
old bottle, while he was still a working bookbinder. And it is a
curious fact, that Faraday was first attracted to the study of
chemistry by hearing one of Sir Humphry Davy's lectures on the
subject at the Royal Institution. A gentleman, who was a member,
calling one day at the shop where Faraday was employed in binding
books, found him pouring over the article "Electricity," in an
encyclopedia placed in his hands to bind. The gentleman, having made
inquiries, found that the young bookbinder was curious about such
subjects, and gave him an order of admission to the Royal
Institution, where he attended a course of four lectures delivered by
Sir Humphry. He took notes of them, which he showed to the lecturer,
who acknowledged their scientific accuracy, and was surprised when
informed of the humble