Roscoe, referring to the two life-sized marble statues which face each other in the Manchester Town Hall, says with pardonable pride: "Thus honor is done to Manchester's two greatest sons--to Dalton, the founder of modern Chemistry and of the Atomic Theory, and the discoverer of the laws of chemical combining proportions; to Joule, the founder of modern Physics and the discoverer of the Law of the Conservation of Energy." REFERENCES Alembic Club Reprints, _Foundations of the Atomic Theory_. Joseph Priestley, _Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air_. Sir William Ramsay, _The Gases of the Atmosphere and the History of their Discovery_. Sir Henry E. Roscoe, _John Dalton_. Sir E. Thorpe, _Essays in Historical Chemistry_. CHAPTER XIII THE SCIENTIST--SIR HUMPHRY DAVY Humphry Davy (1778-1829) was born in Cornwall, a part of England known for its very mild climate and the combined beauty and majesty of its scenery. On either side of the peninsula the Atlantic in varying mood lies extended in summer sunshine, or from its shroud of mist thunders on the black cliffs and their time-sculptured sandstones. From the coast inland, stretch, between flowered lanes and hedges, rolling pasture-lands of rich green made all the more vivid by the deep reddish tint of the ploughed fields. In Penzance, then a town of about three thousand inhabitants, and in its picturesque vicinity, the early years of Davy's life were passed. Across the bay rose the great vision of the guarded mount (St. Michael's) of which Milton's verse speaks. Farther to the east lay Lizard Head, the southernmost promontory of England, and a few miles to the north St. Ives with its sweep of sandy beach; while not far to the west of Penzance Land's End stood sentry "'Twixt two unbounded seas." The youthful Davy was keenly alive to the charms of his early environment, and his genius was susceptible to the belief in supernatural agencies native to the imaginative Celtic people among whom he was reared. As a precocious child of five he improvised rhymes, and as a youth set forth in excellent verse the glories of Mount's Bay:-- "There did I first rejoice that I was born Amidst the majesty of azure seas."