“Lo! o’er the earth the kindling spirits pour The flames of life that bounteous Nature gives; The limpid dew becomes the rosy flower, The insensate dust awakes, and moves, and lives.” It is too long to give here, but of all his poetical effusions it is perhaps the best, as it certainly is the most highly-polished. One proof of what Davy was to the Royal Institution is seen in the position to which it was reduced in consequence of his protracted illness. In the early part of the previous December the Managers made the following announcement:-- “Mr. Davy, having been confined to his bed this last fortnight by a severe illness, the Managers are under the painful necessity of giving notice that the lectures will not commence until the first week of January next.” By the interruption of the lectures the income of the Institution was greatly diminished; it fell from £4,141 in the preceding year to £1,560. This was the low-water mark of its financial state. How acute was the condition may be seen from the report of the Visitors in 1808. Davy, although better, was still in bed, confined there by the want of a sofa in his room. This was not provided by the Managers until January 25th, when, as the minutes tell us, they furnished him with one at a cost of three guineas. One would have thought he might have had Albemarle Street blocked with sofas if some of those lady-friends who sent him sonnets, and intrigued for his company at their salons, had only known of his condition. The laboratory journals show that on April 19th he was able to resume his experiments, and that he proceeded to attack the composition of muriatic [hydrochloric] acid. The note runs, “Indications of the decomposition of muriatic acid. To use every effort to ensure accuracy in the results.” He seems to have decomposed muriatic acid gas by means of charcoal terminals, and also to have acted on a mixture of dry calcium chloride and mercury. On June 30th he contributed a paper to the Royal Society on “Electro-Chemical Researches on the Decomposition of the Earths; with Observations on the Metals obtained from the alkaline Earths, and on the Amalgam procured from Ammonia.” That the earths would turn out to be related to the metals was surmised by Becher and Stahl. Boyle considered it possible that metals might be produced from them, and Neumann described unsuccessful experiments to obtain a metal from quicklime. Bergman imagined that baryta was a metallic calx, and Baron that alumina contained a metal. The supposition that the calces were all compounds of metals was, of course, a part of the antiphlogistic doctrine; but Lavoisier never hazarded any conjecture as to the nature of potash and soda. It went almost without saying therefore that when Davy had demonstrated the real character of the fixed alkalis, the alkaline earths would be found to have an analogous constitution.