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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
In a letter found not long ago in the Institute of Electrical Engineers and recently republished in the new edition of Faraday's correspondence, certain allegations are made about difficulties experienced by Humphry Davy in getting his work published in Napoleonic France. These allegations have been repeated in the standard Davy bibliography and are believed by at least one other Davy scholar known to the author. A new biography of Faraday makes much of this supposed incident and suggests a comparison with Stalinist Russia. No doubt the letter will continue to be quoted and the story believed until someone takes the trouble to examine the situation more closely.
1 Williams, L. Pearce (ed.), The selected correspondence of Michael Faraday (2 vols., Cambridge, 1971), i. 195–6.Google Scholar On the discovery of the letter see Agassi, Joseph, ‘An unpublished paper of the young Faraday’, Isis, lii (1961), 87–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where Agassi accepts the evidence of suppression.
2 Fullmer, June Z., Sir Humphry Davy's published work (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), p. 60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Agassi, Joseph, Faraday as a natural philosopher (Chicago, 1971), pp. 24–5.Google Scholar It is not clear whether Agassi's remarks are intended as serious history. He writes: ‘better an interesting error which may be read and rectified than a dull truth’ (op. cit., p. xiii).
4 The criticism of French science is a constant theme in Moll's letters to Faraday; see Williams, , op. cit. (1), i. 187–8, 206–7.Google Scholar See also Moll's work, cited in note 5, passim.
5 On the alleged decline of science in England by a Foreigner [Moll, G.] (London, 1831), p. 6.Google Scholar
6 Agassi, , op. cit. (1), 88.Google Scholar
7 Mrs Fullmer (loc. cit. [2]) accepts the first allegation but says of the second that ‘the threat proved an idle one’.
8 Fullmer, , op. cit. (2), p. 3.Google Scholar Thenard never ‘controlled’ the Annales de chimie. A general study of the first series of this journal has been undertaken at the University of Leeds by Mrs Susan Court; see Court, Susan, ‘The Annales de chimie, 1789–1815’, Ambix, xix (1972), 113–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 In 1816, when a new series was started under the title Annales de chimie et de physique, Gay-Lussac and Arago became joint editors. Anyone writing in 1831 might unreflecting lv associate Gay-Lussac permanently with the control of the Annales.
10 A genuine case in which a paper by an established figure was refused publication was that of John Dalton, who undertook the publication of his own paper ‘On the phosphates and arseniates’ in 1840 after the Royal Society had refused to accept it. In this case the refusal to publish was probably justified. See Smyth, A. L., John Dalton, 1766–1844. A bibliography of works by and about him (Manchester, 1966), p. 6.Google Scholar
11 Davy may well have been justifiably annoyed by the reporting on the Continent of some of his work. Mrs Fullmer mentions an abstract of a memoir of 1809 by Charles Gaspard de la Rive in the Bibliothèque britannique, which quotes his research only to refute his conclusions on the basis of the alternative views of Gay-Lussac and Thenard (Fullmer, , op. cit. [2], pp. 3, 56).Google Scholar
12 Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London (1810), pp. 16–74.Google Scholar
13 The French competition seems to have encouraged Davy to premature publication. His brother remarked that it ‘necessarily had the effect of hurrying on his researches’; see Collected works of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. Davy, John (9 vols., London, 1839–1840), v. 101n.Google Scholar
14 Annales de chimie, lxxv (1810), 27–77 and 129–75.Google Scholar The translator was Prieur Duvernois.
15 ‘Observations sur les recherches de MM Gay-Lussac et Thenard, relativement à l'amalgame de l'ammoniaque’; ‘Examen de quelques observations de MM. Gay-Lussac et Thenard provenant des alkalis’; ‘Réplique à la réponse aux recherches analytiques, etc., Journal de physique, Décembre 1809, Par MM. Gay-Lussac et Thenard’, Journal de physique, lxx (1810), 389–92, 393–7, 398–405.Google Scholar
16 ‘Observations sur les trois précédens mémoires de M. Davy’, Journal de physique, lxx (1810), 408–23.Google Scholar
17 Annales de chimie, lxxv (1810), 256–89 (issue dated 30 September 1810).Google Scholar
18 Davy, , Works, v. 305.Google Scholar
19 Mrs Fullmer speaks of John Davy ‘trying to deify an adored brother’ and asserts that his most common method was omission, ‘brightening his hero's image more through reticence than through rhetoric’; see Fullmer, June Z., ‘Davy's biographers: notes on scientific biography’, Science, clv (1967), 285–91 (288).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20 Its title was Observations sur la physique … until 1793.
21 Neave, E. W. J., ‘Chemistry in Rozier's Journal. I. The Journal and its editors’, Annals of science, vi (1948–1950), 416–21.Google Scholar
22 This is an over-simplification. It was also hoped to have a French equivalent of L. Crell's Chemische Annalen; see Grimaux, E., Lavoisier (Paris, 1888), p. 370.Google Scholar
23 He was professeur adjoint for natural history.
24 Journal de physique, xli (1792), 394–9.Google Scholar
25 A reputation encouraged by La Métherie himself repeatedly in his editorials in the Journal de physique.
26 E.g. Yorke, H. R., Letters from France (London, 1814), ii. p. 313.Google Scholar
27 The full text of Davy's note published by La Métherie was as follows: ‘Monsieur, je vous prie d'insérer dans le Journal de Physique, les Mémoires ci-joints [celui ci et celui qui a été imprimé dans le cahier du mois de mai].
Je les confie à votre amour pour la verité et la justice.’ (Journal de physique, lxxi [1810], 43n.)Google Scholar
28 Crosland, Maurice, The Society of Arcueil. A view of French science at the time of Napoleon I (London, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see especially chapter 1.
29 Moll admits in his letter that he did not have sources to hand.
30 Crosland, , op. cit. (28), e.g. pp. 161 ff., 447, 474.Google Scholar
