
lasted more than ten minutes. The writer of his obituary notice, M.
Biot, epigrammatically said:--“Il était le plus riche de tous les
savans, et le plus savant de tous les riches.”

[Illustration: H. Cavendish]

He was a regular attendant at the meetings of the Royal Society, of
which he was made a Fellow in 1760, and was a constant diner at the
Royal Society Club. It is said that he used to talk to his neighbour at
table so long as others did not join in the conversation; but if the
conversation took a general turn, he was silent.

His death took place in February 1810, and was as solitary as his
life. It is related by his servant that Cavendish, on feeling his end
approaching, dismissed him from the room, telling him to come back in
half an hour. He disobeyed instructions, and, being anxious, found some
pretext to enter the room. Cavendish ordered him away in a voice of
displeasure; and on returning, the man found his master dead.

Such a life demands our pity; yet, if an object of human life is to
give pleasure to its possessor, we can hardly say that Cavendish’s was
a failure. Ordinary mortals have a craving for the sympathy of their
fellows; Cavendish appears to have been devoid of any such sensation.
Indeed, his experiments were in many cases not published until long
after they had been made. He appears to have carried on his work for
his own information, and to have been indifferent to the impression
which his labours made on his fellow-men. Yet his inquiries cover a
more extensive field than those of almost any other man of science.
They begin with experiments on arsenic, by which he endeavoured to
determine the difference between the element arsenic and its two
oxides. He held that arsenic acid was more thoroughly “deprived of
phlogiston” than arsenious acid (_i.e._ more highly oxidised); and
on the same occasion he studied the effect of the addition of air to
nitric oxide, produced by the action of nitric acid on the element
arsenic and on arsenious oxide. His next experiments related to hea