The paragraph from the 'Courier and Enquirer,' which is now going the
rounds of the press, and which purports to claim the invention for a
Mr. Kissam, of Brunswick, Maine, appears to me, I confess, a little
apocryphal, for several reasons; although there is nothing either
impossible or very improbable in the statement made. I need not go
into details. My opinion of the paragraph is founded principally upon
its manner. It does not look true. Persons who are narrating facts,
are seldom so particular as Mr. Kissam seems to be, about day and
date and precise location. Besides, if Mr. Kissam actually did come
upon the discovery he says he did, at the period designated -- nearly
eight years ago -- how happens it that he took no steps, on the
instant, to reap the immense benefits which the merest bumpkin must
have known would have resulted to him individually, if not to the
world at large, from the discovery? It seems to me quite incredible
that any man of common understanding could have discovered what Mr.
Kissam says he did, and yet have subsequently acted so like a baby --
so like an owl -- as Mr. Kissam admits that he did. By-the-way, who
is Mr. Kissam? and is not the whole paragraph in the 'Courier and
Enquirer' a fabrication got up to 'make a talk'? It must be confessed
that it has an amazingly moon-hoaxy-air. Very little dependence is to
be placed upon it, in my humble opinion; and if I were not well
aware, from experience, how very easily men of science are mystified,
on points out of their usual range of inquiry, I should be profoundly
astonished at finding so eminent a chemist as Professor Draper,
discussing Mr. Kissam's (or is it Mr. Quizzem's?) pretensions to the
discovery, in so serious a tone.

But to return to the 'Diary' of Sir Humphrey Davy. This pamphlet was
not designed for the public eye, even upon the decease of the writer,
as any person at all conversant with authorship may satisfy himself