Volta sent the first account of his discovery of the voltaic pile to Sir Joseph Banks. His paper was printed in the ‘Philosophical Transactions’ for 1800--on the ‘Electricity Excited by the mere Contact of Conducting Substances of Different Kinds.’ Davy, on October 20, 1800, wrote, ‘Galvanism I have found, by numerous experiments, to be a process purely chemical,’ and on June 18, 1801, the first paper Davy sent to the Royal Society was on a galvanic combination of a single metallic plate and two fluids. In May 1802 he says, ‘A battery of immense size has been made for the Institution, and I am now examining the agencies of it upon certain substances that have not been decomposed.’ His lectures on Agriculture, Mineralogy, and Geology so occupied his time that very little remained for original research, and it was not until this year that a close examination of the decomposition of water by electricity led him to investigate the action of the voltaic battery, and to establish the union of electricity and chemistry. For this and his former work the name of Davy ought for ever to be inseparably united with the discovery of chemical electricity. But the honour at that time paid to Davy was not for establishing the production of electricity by chemistry, but for endeavouring to prove that all chemical action was caused by electricity. He received no praise as the founder of chemical electricity, but he was looked on as the discoverer of electro-chemistry--that is, of the theory that the electrical condition or polarity of each element determined its chemical action. The following year (1807) is still more memorable in the annals of the Institution on account of the originality of the discoveries made in the laboratory. No year in the life of the Institution has equalled this in the magic novelty of the results that were obtained. Davy (æt. 28) proved that the bases of the alkalies were solid metals. He called them potassium and sodium, and he showed that they made potash and soda when united with oxygen. The year 1831 was a noble year for the Royal Institution. In it Faraday (æt. 40) discovered that the magnet produced electricity and founded magneto-electricity. Great discoveries in different sciences made at different periods do not admit of any accurate comparison. It may, however, be said that in unimagined novelty the results of Davy far surpassed the results of Faraday; for the discovery of magneto-electricity had been foreshadowed by the discovery of electro-magnetism; but in its telegraphic and other applications the discovery of magneto-electricity will keep the name of Faraday for ever in the remembrance of the world.