ABSTRACT
Creative science is a game for the young. Those excel in it who retain a childlike curiosity about the world down to an age when most of their contemporaries have got interested in other things like sex, power and money. Humphry Davy's work on laughing gas was done when he was twenty-one; his electrochemical researches led to his discovery of potassium when he was twenty-nine; by his middle thirties he had elucidated the nature of chlorine, and invented the safety lamp for coal miners. If we concentrate upon his life in science as a matter of making discoveries, then his later life will have little interest for us. Historians of science have much less trouble than they used to do in coping with those who take up institutional responsibilities though their research falls away thereby. Davy saw the world in terms of natural theology; science properly understood led to wisdom and not only to knowledge.
