At a preparatory school and at the Penzance Grammar School Humphry Davy
was a noticeable boy. He read eagerly and showed great quickness of
imagination, delighted in legends, when eight years old told stories to
his companions, and as a boy wrote verse. There was a Quaker saddler who
made for himself an electrical machine and mechanical models, in which
young Davy took keen interest, and from that saddler, Robert Dunkin, came
the first impulse towards experiments in science. At fifteen Davy was
placed for further education at a school in Truro. A year later his
father died, and John Tonkin apprenticed him, on the 10th of February,
1795, to Dr. Borlase, a surgeon in large practice at Penzance. Medical
practitioners in those days dispensed their own medicines, and the
inquiring mind of this young apprentice being let loose upon a store-room
of chemicals, experimental chemistry became his favourite pursuit. His
grandfather, by adoption, allowed him to fit up a garret as a laboratory,
notwithstanding the fears of the household that "This boy, Humphry, will
blow us all into the air."

Activity and originality of mind, with a persistent habit of inquiry and
experiment, brought Davy friends who could appreciate and help him. When
Dr. Beddoes, of Bristol, was examining the Cornish coast, in 1798, he
came upon young Humphry Davy, was told of researches made by him, and
urged to engage him as laboratory assistant in a Pneumatic Institution
that he was then establishing in Bristol. Davy went in October, 1798,
then in his twentieth year; but his good friend, and grandfather by
adoption, had set his heart upon Humphry's becoming an eminent burgeon,
and even altered his will when his boy yielded to the temptation of a
laboratory for research. Men also know something of the trouble of the
hen who has a chance duckling in her brood, and sees that contumacious
chicken run into the water deaf to all the warnings of her love.