Such was the character, such the effect of Davy's discourses. They exhibit a great assemblage of diversified talents, and display the refined views he entertained with respect to the mutual relations which the different sciences maintain with each other; they evince, moreover, a great command of language, and a power to give exact expression to what his mind had conceived.
To these six Discourses is prefixed his Address upon taking the chair of the Royal Society for the first time; the subject of which is "The present state of that Body, and the Progress and Prospects of Science." Upon this occasion, he particularly adverts to the light which the different branches of science may reflect upon each other. "In pure Mathematics--though their nature, as a work of intellectual combination, framed by the highest efforts of human intelligence, renders them incapable of receiving aids from observations of external phenomena, or the invention of new instruments, yet they are, at this moment, abundant in the promise of new applications; and many of the departments of philosophical enquiry which appeared formerly to bear no relation to quantity, weight, figure, or number, as I shall more particularly mention hereafter, are now brought under the dominion of that sublime science, which is, as it were, the animating principle of all the other sciences."
"In the theory of light and vision, the researches of Huygens, Newton, and Wollaston, have been followed by those of Malus; and the phenomena of polarization are constantly tending to new discoveries; and it is extremely probable that those beautiful results will lead to a more profound knowledge than has hitherto been obtained, concerning the intimate constitution of bodies, and establish a near connexion between mechanical and chemical philosophy."
"The subject of heat, so nearly allied to that of light, has lately afforded a rich harvest of discovery; yet it is fertile in unexplored phenomena. The question of the materiality of heat will probably be solved at the same time as that of the undulating hypothesis of light, if, indeed, the human mind should ever be capable of understanding the causes of these mysterious phenomena. The applications of the doctrine of heat to the atomic or corpuscular philosophy of chemistry abound in new views, and probably at no very distant period these views will assume a precise mathematical form."