“I long very much for the intercourse of a week with you: I have very much to say about Ireland. It is an island which might be made a new and a great country. It now boasts a fertile soil, an ingenious and robust peasantry, and a rich aristocracy; but the bane of the nation is the equality of poverty amongst the lower orders. All are slaves, without the probability of becoming free; they are in the state of equality which the _sans culottes_ wished for in France; and until emulation, and riches, and the love of clothes and neat houses are introduced among them, there will be no permanent improvement. “Changes in political institutions can, at first, do little towards serving them; it must be by altering their habits, by diffusing manufactories, by destroying _middlemen_, by dividing farms, and by promoting industry by making the pay proportional to the work: but I ought not to attempt to say anything on the subject when my limits are so narrow; I hope soon to converse with you about it.” With the exception of a rapid journey into Cornwall, for the sake of seeing his family, he spent the greater part of the summer and autumn of 1807 in town. He had been made Secretary of the Royal Society in succession to Gray, and was obliged to be in or near London in order to see the _Philosophical Transactions_ through the press. From the Laboratory Journal it would appear that he was occupied at this time on a variety of disconnected investigations such as the nature of Antwerp Blue, and the effect of electricity on flame. In a letter to Davies Gilbert, dated September 12th, he states that he has been a good deal engaged in experiments on distillation for revenue purposes. Towards the end of this month, or during the first week of October, he resumed his experiments with the voltaic battery, and he was led to study its action on the alkalis. There is some evidence that he had attacked the same question at Bristol. In a note-book of that period, under date August 6th, 1800, is the following sentence: “I cannot close this notice without feeling grateful to M. Volta, Mr. Nicholson, and Mr. Carlisle, whose experience has placed such a wonderful and important instrument of analysis in my power”--evidently a jotting to be used in one of the short communications to Nicholson’s Journal. This is immediately followed by “Query: Would not potash, dissolved in spirits of wine, become a conductor?” And he then gives an account of some experiments on the action of voltaic electricity on aqueous solutions of ammonia, caustic potash, and hydrochloric acid, which apparently led to the same result as that already obtained by Nicholson and Carlisle in the case of water.