‘Before I solicit your attention to the opening of those lectures which I shall have the honour of delivering in the course of the season, permit me to trespass upon it for a few minutes by stating the peculiar circumstances under which this Institution is now again opened, and how it comes to pass that it has fallen to me rather than to a more deserving lecturer to be the first to address you. ‘The managers of this Institution have directed me to impart to you that intelligence which no one who is alive to the best feelings of human nature can hear without the mixed emotions of sorrow and delight. ‘Mr. Davy, whose frequent and powerful addresses from this place, supported by his ingenious experiments, have been so long and so well known to you, has for the last five weeks been struggling between life and death. The effects of those experiments recently made in illustration of his late splendid discovery, added to consequent bodily weakness, brought on a fever so violent as to threaten the extinction of life. Over him it might emphatically be said, in the language of the immortal Milton, that-- Death his dart shook, but delayed to strike. If it had pleased Providence to deprive the world of all _further_ benefit from his original talents and intense application there has certainly been sufficient _already_ effected by him to entitle him to be classed among the brightest scientific luminaries of his country. That this may not appear to be unfounded eulogium I shall proceed, at the particular request of the managers, to give you an outline of the splendid discovery just alluded to, and I do so with the greater pleasure as that outline has been drawn in a very masterly manner by a gentleman of all others perhaps the best qualified to do it effectually (Cavendish?) ‘In the course of the last twenty-five or thirty years the science of chemistry has undergone great changes and has been astonishingly augmented by various important discoveries, amongst which the most remarkable have been the decomposition and recomposition of water and of nitric acid, discovered by Mr. Cavendish, and the consequent knowledge of the nature of metallic calces (now called oxides) with that of acids in general.