I have very much to say about Ireland. It is an island that 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 amongst 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 manufactures, by destroying middle men, by dividing farms, and by promoting industry, by making the pay proportioned to the work. But I ought not to attempt to say anything on the subject when my limits are so narrow. Up to 1806 the lectures given by Davy had brought to him repute and to the Royal Institution success. To his high reputation as a lecturer he was now about to add that of a great original discoverer. As early as July 3, 1800, he wrote to Davies Gilbert, ‘We have been repeating the galvanic experiments with success.’ (See p. 316.) These experiments led him to think that all chemical decompositions might be polar. He electrised different compounds at the different poles of the battery, but he made no great discovery for five years. The assertion that acid and alkali were generated by the action of the voltaic pile in the decomposition of water led him to undertake fresh galvanic experiments in 1806. Before long he was rewarded by his great discoveries regarding chemical electricity, the decomposition of the alkalies, and the composition of chlorine. It appears from the Laboratory Books that in September he first made experiments on phosphorus with the galvanic spark, and in the last week of October he ‘tried to decompose phosphorus by the galvanic fluid.’ He fused the phosphorus into a tube through which a platinum wire passed. This was the form of the experiment which he made a year afterwards to compel potash to give up its oxygen.