Life of the Honble, Henry Cavendish

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. When the Council of the Cavendish Society did me the honour to ask me to write the life of the great philosopher with whom the Society had associated itself by its name I willingly undertook the task. During the enforced leisure of a long illness I commenced in 1842 to collect materials for a projected work on the lives of the Chemists of Great Britain in which Cavendish should occupy a prominent place; and I had made some progress in my task when the Cavendish Society was founded. Although an original member of that association, I had no share in determining the selection of the name by which it is distinguished nor was Cavendish an object of greater interest to me than the other great philosophers of our country whose lives I proposed to write. When however, at the call of the Society, I laid aside