Numerous biographies of Cavendish have been published. He was one of the select circle of foreign associates of the Institute of France; and French interest in his work, stimulated by its close relations with that of Lavoisier, was reflected in memoirs by Cuvier in the Éloges Historiques de l' Académie, vol. i and by Biot in the Biographie Universelle, vol. vii. These and other biographies are drawn upon by Dr George Wilson in the very thorough Life of Cavendish (pp. 478), including an analysis of his chemical work, which was undertaken under the auspices of the Cavendish Society, founded in 1846, and appeared in 1851 as one of the early volumes of their publications.
The biographical sketch contributed by Dr Thomas Young to the supplement of the Encyclopaedia Britannica about 1820 has been reprinted here as an Appendix. Young must have been personally well acquainted with Cavendish, and no one was better qualified to form a contemporary judgment on his career.
The portrait prefixed to the present volume is said to have been constructed from surreptitious sketches made by the artist W. Alexander at a dinner of the Royal Society Club. The original is in the print room of the British Museum, where it was re-discovered by Charles Tomlinson, F.R.S. who had an engraving made from it. This engraving has been reproduced as a frontispiece to Wilson's Life, and many times since. The present photographic impression has been taken from the original picture, by permission of the authorities of the British Museum.
It has been the custom, even among Cavendish's admirers, to brand him as misanthropic. But there is surely another side to this judgment. The cultivation of the highest domains of physical science is rarely consistent with dispersal of interest in other directions. The tracking out of great discoveries which will be a possession to the human race for all time has indeed to be its own supreme intellectual satisfaction; and once an investigator has realized, in however modest a way, his capacity for such achievement, he can feel that he is serving humanity in the most perfect manner open to him by concentrating upon that work. Yet the temptation to continual postponement of ordinary social intercourse inevitably involves increasing isolation, and growing habits of solitude. As already noted, there is no evidence that Cavendish's researches aimed at his personal gratification alone : if they had not been adequately recorded by him they could not have been recovered so completely: and it is easy to understand how the driving force of his curiosity and conscious power would impel him to the exploration of new fields, in temporary preference to the final polishing of work already achieved. If he spent his life in compelling the phenomena of physical nature to submit to exact measure and weight, it was not from a special passion for such work, for its own sake, but as the one means of assuring an adequate foundation for sciences then being born : in all directions he was opening up and securing brilliant
