Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. HIS RECEPTION AS A LECTURER AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION. SLANDEROUS CHARGES AGAINST HIM ANSWERED. PROOFS OF HIS REGARD FOR OLD FRIENDSHIPS. EXTRACTS EXPRESSING THE OPINIONS OF SOME OLD FRIENDS RESPECTING HIM. CIRCUMSTANCES FAVOURING HIS SUCCESS IN LECTURING. SPECIMENS OF HIS LECTURES. HIS MANNER OF PREPARING AND DELIVERING THEM. The duties upon which he entered at the Royal Institution were those of assistant lecturer on chemistry, and director of the laboratory; but, according to the terms on which he accepted the situation, this was merely a temporary arrangement, and to last only till he had prepared himself for filling the higher appointment of professor of chemistry. In a letter to my mother, the last referred to, after specifying the conditions, he says,
I hope to be able to undertake the professorship next year; and the next year he did undertake it. On the 31st of May, 1802, he was formally appointed to this office by a resolution of the managers. In the spring of 1801, six weeks after his arrival, he gave his first lecture. I shall transcribe an account of it from the Philosophical Magazine, a contemporary journal. Under the head of the
Royal Institution of Great Britain, the editor remarks, ?
It must give great pleasure to our readers to learn that this new and useful institution, the object of which is the application of science to the common purposes of life, may be now considered as settledon a firm basis. The lectures of Dr. Garnet have been such as do equal honour to the institution and the professor, and have been well attended.
We have also to notice a course of lectures just commenced at the institution, on a new branch of philosophy; we mean the galvanic phenomena: on this interesting branch Mr. Davy (late of Brist…