IN his “Consolations in Travels,” written during the last years of his life and published after his death, Sir Humphry Davy shows the imaginative power and command of language which excited the admiration of Coleridge for his scientific lectures. “I attend Davy’s lectures,” said the author of “The Ancient Mariner,” “to increase my stock of metaphors.” Davy was himself a fluent versifier from his boyhood, but while still in his teens he concluded to be a great scientist instead of a poet, and alarmed the neighbors accordingly by the frequent explosions which ensued as a result of his chemical experiments secretly carried on in the garret. Born at Penzance, in Cornwall, December 17th, 1778, he lost his father in 1794, and his extensive and deep learning was acquired largely by self-education. It is scarcely an exaggeration to call him the founder of nineteenth-century chemistry, for besides his own work resulting in a long list of far-reaching discoveries, he taught Faraday who was a pupil in his laboratory. The safety lamp, which he invented out of compassion for the coal miners of Newcastle, has saved generations of workers from death in its worst form, but as he prepared the way for reducing metals from their oxides by exciting them to molecular vibration, it may fairly be expected that his greatest usefulness is still in the future. He died May 29th, 1829, at Geneva, where he had stopped during the travels by which, after collapsing under his studies, he had hoped to recover his health.