“All classes were very superstitious; even the belief in witches maintained its ground, and there was an almost unbounded credulity respecting the supernatural and monstrous.... Amongst the middle and higher classes there was little taste for literature and still less for science, and their pursuits were rarely of a dignified or intellectual kind. Hunting, shooting, wrestling, cock-fighting, generally ending in drunkenness, were what they most delighted in. Smuggling was carried on to a great extent, and drunkenness and a low scale of morals were naturally associated with it.” Davy, an ardent, impulsive youth of strong social instincts, fond of excitement, and not over studious, seems, now that he was released from the restraint of school-life, to have come under the influence of such surroundings. For nearly a year he was restless and unsettled, spending much of his time like his father in rambling about the country and in fishing and shooting, and passing from desultory study to occasional dissipation. The death of his father, however, made a profound impression on his mind, and suddenly changed the whole course of his conduct. As the eldest son, and approaching manhood, he seems at once to have realised what was due to his mother and to himself. The circumstances of the family supplied the stimulus to exertion, and he dried his mother’s tears with the assurance that he would do all in his power for his brothers and sisters. A few weeks after the decease of his father he was apprenticed to Mr. Bingham Borlase, an apothecary and surgeon practising in Penzance, and at once marked out for himself a course of study and self-tuition almost unparalleled in the annals of biography, and to which he adhered with a strength of mind and tenacity of purpose altogether unlooked for in one of his years and of his gay and careless disposition. That it was sufficiently ambitious will be evident from the following transcript from the opening pages of his earliest note-book--a small quarto, with parchment covers, dated 1795:-- 1. Theology, or Religion, } { taught by Nature; Ethics or Moral virtues } { by Revelation. 2. Geography. 3. My Profession. 1. Botany. 2. Pharmacy. 3. Nosology. 4. Anatomy. 5. Surgery. 6. Chemistry. 4. Logic. 5. Languages. 1. English. 2. French. 3. Latin. 4. Greek. 5. Italian. 6. Spanish. 7. Hebrew. 6. Physics. 1. The doctrines and properties of natural bodies. 2. Of the operations of nature. 3. Of the doctrines of fluids. 4. Of the properties of organised matter. 5. Of the organisation of matter. 6. Simple astronomy. 7. Mechanics. 8. Rhetoric and Oratory. 9. History and Chronology. 10. Mathematics.