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Rh apprehension more than pure intellect, or required the exercise of fancy, imagination, affection or faith, was distasteful to Cavendish. An intellectual head thinking, a pair of wonderfully acute eyes observing, and a pair of very skilful hands experimenting, or recording, are all that I realize in reading his memorials," wrote his biographer sixty years ago.

Cavendish was a profound chemist, mathematician, astronomer, electrician, geologist, and meteorologist; and for fifty years he constantly published important papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Priestley and Cavendish were contemporaries. The work of the former was brilliant and quick; that of the latter was slow and thorough. Although Cavendish wrote much, he had an innate dislike to publicity. He published few papers, destroyed many, and therefore some of his brilliant researches were lost to science. His dread of popularity, want of laudable ambition, lack of enthusiasm, and morbid shyness compelled him to refrain from publishing many important scientific papers. Will there ever be an adequate life of Cavendish? Never. This remarkable man of solitary habits destroyed more papers than he ever published. No doubt the world lost much, for as Sir Humphry Davy said of Cavendish's researches, "they were all of a finished nature, and though many of them were performed in the very infancy of chemical science, yet their accuracy and their beauty have remained unimpaired."