“The Royal Institution will, I hope, be of some utility to Society. It has undoubtedly the capability of becoming a great instrument of moral and intellectual improvement. Its funds are very great. It has attached to it the feelings of a great number of people of fashion and property, and consequently may be the means of employing, to useful purposes, money which would otherwise be squandered in luxury, and in the production of unnecessary labour. Count Rumford professes that it will be kept distinct from party politics; I sincerely wish that such may be the case, though I fear it. As for myself, I shall become attached to it full of hope, with the resolution of employing all my feeble powers towards promoting its true interests. “So much of my paper has been given to pure egotism, that I have but little room left to say anything concerning the state of science.... “Here, at the Pneumatic Institution, the nitrous oxide has evidently been of use. Dr. Beddoes is proceeding in the execution of his great popular physiological work, which, if it equals the plan he holds out, ought to supersede every work of the kind. “I have been pursuing Galvanism with labour, and some success. I have been able to produce galvanic power from simple plates, by effecting on them different oxidating and de-oxidating processes; but on this point I cannot enlarge in the small remaining space of paper.... “It will give me sincere pleasure to hear from you, when you are at leisure. After the 11th I shall be in town--my direction, Royal Institution, Albemarle Street. I am, my dear friend, with respect and affection, “Yours, “HUMPHRY DAVY.” With Davy’s departure we, too, may take our leave of the Pneumatic Institution. Like most of Dr. Beddoes’s performances, it--to use Davy’s words--failed to equal the plan its projector held out. It struggled on for awhile, living on such success as Davy had brought it, and ultimately died of inanition. Its founder ended his days a disappointed man, and on his deathbed wrote to his former assistant, in connection with whom his memory mainly lives, “like one who has scattered abroad the _Avena fatua_ of knowledge, from which neither branch, nor blossom, nor fruit, has resulted, I require the consolations of a friend.” CHAPTER IV. THE ROYAL INSTITUTION.