progress which has been recently made and is now making in the
Institution. After mentioning the lectures and the apparatus for
the lectures, it is said the laboratory for experimental processes
has been enlarged by the addition of the former workroom, and has
been improved by many new arrangements, and provision has been
made in it for preparing the different reagents and tests employed
in philosophical chemistry and for carrying on various new and
interesting researches.
The foundation of a mineralogical collection has been laid by the
exertions of Mr. Professor Davy. For the purpose of extending it
one proprietor has offered 100_l._, and others promised to give
minerals. A collection of fossils was also made.
The reading library is now completed. The room for the collection
of reference, fitted up for 10,000 volumes, some part of which are
already purchased. It was proposed to open it to the proprietors
and subscribers early in the ensuing season. The funds subscribed
amounted to 4,368_l._ 15_s._ As this would not be sufficient to
purchase the whole of the desired collection, it was hoped that
other proprietors and subscribers ‘would enjoy the pleasure of
adding their contributions.’
On November 24 Mr. Dalton wrote to Mr. Savage, the clerk:
RESPECTED FRIEND,--As it will not be convenient to me to be in town
before the 17th or 18th of next month, I should be glad to know
previously whether my accommodation as to board and lodging would
be in the Institution; if not, whether you know of any place in
the vicinity where the same would probably be procured. It will
be necessary for me to spend a considerable portion of time to
make myself acquainted with the structure and use of some of the
apparatus, and therefore I am the more solicitous on the above
heads. Pray, what is the usual duration of a lecture--one or two
hours? An immediate reply to these inquiries will much oblige,
Yours respectfully,
J. DALTON.
Apartments were ordered by the managers to be prepared in the house for
Mr. Dalton before December 17.
On Monday, December 22, at two, he gave the introduction to a course
of four lectures on Mechanics and Physics. In this lecture he dwelt on
the objects of natural philosophy, division of the science, utility of
the study, plan of the lectures. The second lecture was on Monday, 26,
at eight P.M., on the Properties of Matter; extension, impenetrability,
divisibility, inertia, various species of attraction and repulsion,
_motion_, _forces_, composition of forces, _collision_, _pendulums_.
The third lecture was on Wednesday, 28, at two. _Projectiles_;
resistance of the air, _mechanic powers_, strength of timber. The
fourth on Thursday, at two. Pneumatics; nature of electric fluids,
the atmosphere, air-pump, spring and weight of the air proved by
experiments, barometer. The last lecture was given on Saturday, 31, at
eight. This was followed by other courses, making altogether twenty
lectures.
After his return to Manchester Dalton wrote to his brother, February 1,
1804:
DEAR BROTHER,--I have the satisfaction to inform thee that I
returned safe from my London journey last seventh day, having been
absent six weeks. It has on many accounts been an interesting
_vocation_ to me, though a very laborious one. I went in a great
measure unprepared, not knowing the nature and manner of the
lectures at the Institution nor the apparatus. My first was on
Thursday, December 22, which was introductory, being entirely
written, giving an account of what was intended to be done; and on
natural philosophy in general. All lectures were to be one hour
each, or as nearly as might be. The number attending were from one
to three hundred of both sexes, usually more than half men. I was
agreeably disappointed to find so _learned_ and _attentive_ an
audience, though many of them of rank. It required great labour
on my part to get acquainted with the apparatus and to draw up
the order of experiments and repeat them in the intervals between
the lectures, though I had one pretty expert to assist me. We
had the good fortune, however, never to fail in any experiment,
though I was once so ill prepared as to beg the indulgence of the
audience as to part of the lecture, which they most handsomely and
immediately granted me by a general plaudit. The scientific part of
the audience was wonderfully taken with some of my original notions
relative to heat, the gases &c., some of which had not before been
published. Had my hearers been generally of the description I had
apprehended, the most interesting lectures I had to give would have
been the least relished; but, as it happened, the expectation
formed had drawn several gentlemen of first-rate talents together,
and my eighteenth, on Heat and the Laws of Expansion, &c., was
received with the greatest applause; with very few experiments.
The one that followed was on _Mixed Elastic Fluids_, in which
I had an opportunity of developing my ideas, that have already
been published on the subject, more fully. The doctrine has, as
I apprehended it would, excited the attention of philosophers
throughout Europe. Two journals in the German language came into
the Royal Institution whilst I was there from Saxony, both of which
were about half filled with translations from the papers I have
written on this subject and comments upon them.
Dr. Ainslie was occasionally one of my audience, and his sons
constantly. He came up at the concluding lecture, expressed his
high satisfaction, and he believed it was the same sentiment with
all or most of the audience.
I saw my successor, William Allen, fairly launched. He gave his
first lecture on Tuesday, preceding my conclusion. I was an
_auditor_ in this case--the first time--and had an opportunity
of surveying the audience. Amongst others of distinction the
Bishop of Durham was present. In lecturing on optics I got six
ribbands--blue, pink, lilac, red, green, and brown--which matched
very well, and told the various audience so. I do not know whether
they generally believed me to be serious, but one gentlemen came up
immediately after and told me he perfectly agreed with me. He had
not remarked the difference by candle light.
Throughout the year 1803 scarcely a trace of Count Rumford’s name can
be found in the records of the Institution. On January 24, when writing
from Munich to the clerk, Mr. Savage, about his house in Brompton Row,
he only begs his compliments to Dr. Young and to Mr. Davy, and on
November 11, the clerk having asked him about an account relating to
the Institution, he wrote from Paris:
I assure you that I have not the smallest recollection of having
received from Mr. Hunter, the solicitor of the Institution, the
account you mention in your letter of the 7th ult.; and had I in
fact received it, I should most undoubtedly have laid it before
the managers of the Institution. I can imagine no reason which
could have induced me to keep it back; and, as all the affairs of
the Institution in my hands were kept with the utmost care and
regularity, as you can testify, it is not likely that I should have
mislaid and forgotten it. This is all I can say on the subject, and
I hope and trust that this declaration will be satisfactory to the
managers of the Royal Institution and to Mr. Hunter.
I expect to be in England in the course of the winter.
Gradually the ‘usefulness of science to the poorer classes and to
the common purposes of life’ ceased to be the prime object of the
Institution. The school for mechanics, the workshops, and the models,
the kitchens and the Journals, died away; and the laboratory, the
lectures, and the library became the life of the new Institution, and
its object became ‘the diffusion of knowledge and the application of
science to the improvement of arts and manufactures.’
The most memorable scientific incident in the history of the Rumford
Institution was its relationship with Dr. Thomas Young. His lectures
on physics must even now be held to rank as the greatest work in the
literature of the Institution. As Professor and Superintendent of the
House he had no great success; and he had no great influence on its
fortunes; but by his genius he anticipated the progress of science,
and his reputation has risen until it now ranks with that of Davy and
Faraday.
A short sketch of his life will bring this period of the history of the
Institution to a close.
Thomas Young was born in Somersetshire on June 13, 1773. Both his
parents were Quakers, and to their tenets he was accustomed to
attribute his resolution to effect any object on which he was engaged.
This determination he brought to bear on all he did, and by this
he educated himself almost from infancy ‘with little comparative
assistance or direction from others.’
His earliest years were passed with a grandfather, a merchant at
Minehead, who had some classical taste. He encouraged his precocious
grandchild and often repeated to him that--
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.
From 1780 to 1787 (7 to 14) he was chiefly at school. He gives an
account of his acquirements in an autobiography written in Latin at
this time--writing, arithmetic, Latin, Greek, mathematics, natural
philosophy, introduction to the Newtonian philosophy, turning,
telescope making, bookbinding, colour making, drawing, Hebrew, botany,
fluctions, Priestly on Air, Italian, Chaldee, Syriac, Samaritan. He was
a prodigy at fourteen.
His father had a neighbour, a man of great ingenuity, by profession a
land-surveyor, in whose office during the holidays the boy was given
the use of mathematical and philosophical instruments and the perusal
of three volumes of a dictionary of arts and science. He got some
practical knowledge of land-surveying. This led him to botany; and to
examine his plants he made a microscope. This required a knowledge of
optics, and thence he went to mathematics and fluctions.
From 1787 to 1792 (14 to 19) his studies and his position were equally
extraordinary. He became classical tutor to a boy a year and a half
his junior. Mr. Barclay, of Youngsbury, took him as companion to his
grandson, Hudson Gurney, who had a tutor. Young taught the tutor Greek,
and taught his companion Latin and Greek, whilst he taught himself
Latin, French, Italian, mathematics, natural philosophy, botany, and
entomology.
When 16 (1789) he was threatened with consumption. His uncle, Dr.
Brocklesby, the friend of Burke, attended him, and through him Burke
and Porson and others became interested in the great classical
knowledge of the youth, and encouraged him in his translations of
Shakespear into Greek iambics.
It was at this period that his character was most strongly formed:
He was never known to relax in any object which he had once
undertaken. During the whole term of these five years he was never
seen by anyone on any occasion to be ruffled in temper. Whatever he
determined on he did. He had little faith in any peculiar aptitude
being implanted by nature for any given pursuits. His favourite
maxim was, that whatever one man had done another might do; that
the original difference between human intellects was much less than
it was generally supposed to be; that strenuous and persevering
attention would accomplish almost anything; and at this season, in
the confidence of youth and consciousness of his own powers, he
considered nothing that had been compassed by others beyond his
reach to achieve; nor was there anything which he thought worthy to
be attempted which he was not resolved to master.
In 1792 he entered the medical profession, learning anatomy from Hunter
in London.
In 1793 he became a pupil at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and on May
30 he had a paper read to the Royal Society on the ‘Structure of the
Crystalline Lens,’ which he thought to be muscular. Hunter claimed
the discovery as his, and was only prevented by death from giving the
Croonian lecture at the Royal Society in proof of his right. Sir E.
Home, in the Croonian lecture the following year, stated that neither
Young nor Hunter was right.
In 1794 (æt. 21) he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
About this time the Duke of Richmond, at Bath, thus wrote to Dr.
Brocklesby:
Bath, May 5, 1794.
I need not write much about myself, as your nephew, who dined with
us yesterday, will give you a good account of my health. I have,
however, still returns of head-ache, and my legs continue very
weak. But I must tell you how much pleased we all are with Mr.
Young. I really never saw a young man more pleasing and engaging.
He seems to have already acquired much knowledge in most branches
and to be studious of obtaining more; it comes out without
affectation on all subjects he talks upon. He is very cheerful and
easy without assuming anything, and even on the peculiarity of his
dress and Quakerism he talked so reasonably that one cannot wish
him to alter himself in any one particular. In short, I end as I
began, by assuring you that the Duchess and I are quite charmed
with him, and shall be happy to renew our acquaintance with him
when we return to London.
Later in the autumn the Duke, who was Master-General of the Ordnance,
offered to make him his private secretary.
In a letter to his mother Young says:
I have very lately refused the pressing offer of a situation which
would have been the most favourable and flattering introduction to
political life that a young man in my circumstances could desire.
I might have lived at a duke’s table, with a salary of 200_l._
a year, as his secretary, and with hopes of a more lucrative
appointment in a short time. I should have been in an agreeable
family, have had time enough for study, a library, a laboratory,
and philosophical apparatus at my service; and I was not ashamed to
allege my regard for our society as a principal reason for my not
accepting the proposal.
In the winter of 1794-5 he went to Edinburgh to study medicine. He
learnt Spanish, German, music in theory and by playing the flute,
dancing; and he went as much as he could into society and to the play.
Soon after he left Edinburgh in June he wrote to his friend and
fellow-student Dr. Bostock:
I have seen Mrs. Siddons in ‘Douglas,’ the ‘Grecian Daughter,’ the
‘Mourning Bride,’ the ‘Provoked Husband,’ the ‘Fatal Marriage,’
‘Macbeth,’ and ‘Venice Preserved.’ She was neither below nor much
above my expectation. I can form an idea of something more perfect.
My friend Cruikshanks, when I went to take my leave of him, took
me aside and, after much preamble, told me he heard I had been
at the play, and hoped that I should be able to contradict it. I
told him ‘I had been several times, and thought it right to go,’
&c. &c., as civilly as I could. ‘I know you are determined to
discourage my dancing and singing, and I am determined to pay no
regard whatever to what you say. You think I shall never be able to
play the flute well, and I am pretty sure that I may if I choose;
as to dancing, the die is cast.’
At this time he gave up the dress and all the other peculiarities of
the Quakers.
On June 5 he started on a journey through the Highlands ‘in se totus
teres atque rotundus,’ as a friend described him.
I was mounted on a stout, well-made black horse, fourteen hands
high, young and spirited, which I had purchased from my friend
Cathcart. I had before me my oiled linens, the spencer with a
separate camlet cover; under me a pair of saddle-bags, well filled
with three or four changes of linen, a waistcoat, and breeches;
materials for writing and for drawing; paper, pens, ink, pencils,
and colours; packing-paper and twine for minerals; soap, brushes,
and a razor; a small edition of Thomson’s ‘Seasons,’ a third
flute in a bag; some music, principally Scotch, bound with some
blank music-paper; wafers; a box for botanising; a thermometer;
two little bottles with spirits for preserving insects; a bag
for picking up stones; two maps of Scotland--Ainslie’s small one
and Sayer’s; letters of recommendation. The bags had pockets at
the end, one containing a pair of shoes, the other boards with
straps and paper for drying plants. I found my bags at first an
encumbrance, but became afterwards more reconciled to them. They
are to a saddle what pockets are to a coat; and who objects to
wearing pockets? But they were wetted the first day and stained
their contents. This will make me more careful in future.
Some of his notes at Gordon and Inverary Castles are cabinet pictures.
It was Lady Georgina’s birthday (afterwards Duchess of Bedford);
the flag was hoisted. Lord Alexander’s regiment of little boys was
paraded, and employed in racing and dancing on the green, and in
the evening a ball was given to the servants; all the family went
downstairs and amused themselves with observing the agility of the
lads and lasses. Every person employed about the house, except
one man, is married, and most of them are descended from those
who have served the family before them. The Duchess proposed, in
honour of the day, that Sir George Abercrombie and I should dance
a reel with the two younger ladies; for they danced nothing but
reels. Afterwards the Duke danced with one of the upper servants.
Some time after our party joined again in the amusement at the same
time with two others; when it was late, and Sir George was tired,
we took a girl in his place and resumed the sport. Lady Madeline
(Sinclair) sat by, and made the music play till the other sets
quitted the field, and left us victorious to reel through the whole
room. I have now written as much of dancing in my tour as Johnson
has in his, and as much more as a young man may be expected to
write of it than an old one.
At Inverary [he writes] after breakfast the party were to ride, and
the Doctor gravely submitted to my determination whether I would go
at a slow pace with him and the Duke to view the country leisurely
on the way, or ride with the ladies and be galloped over. I told
him that of all things I liked to be galloped over, and therefore
should be of the youthful party....
After dinner the Duke rode again, and the younger men of the party
took a walk. I left them about nine, and joined the ladies at
tea. I was showing Lady Charlotte some of my sketches; she begged
to see my notes, and I showed the greatest part of them. All the
family are musical; the ladies sing admirably. Cards and a fine
piano occupied the evening. After supper, besides other songs, I
heard a most beautiful canzonet by Jackson, beginning ‘Love in thy
eyes.’ It was twelve o’clock when we retired. After breakfast I
took my leave, not without regretting that I had so little time to
observe the beauties of Inverary. Lady Charlotte is handsomer than
Lady Augusta: she sings better, but she has less good sense and
less sweetness. An innocent girlishness sometimes gives her the
appearance of a little affectation. She is to Lady Augusta what
Venus is to Minerva. I suppose she wishes for no more. Both are
goddesses.
On October 7 he left London to graduate at Göttingen; he went by
Hamburg.
On December 14 he wrote to Dr. Bostock:
You will be pleased, as a lover of the fine arts, to hear that I am
taking lessons in drawing. You will not be surprised that I receive
in this study, as well as in music and dancing, full approbation
from my masters for application and accuracy. At the same time they
honestly tell me that ease is wanting, and you will also readily
believe that I have the assurance not to be discouraged with this
character, while they all assert that I may confidently expect
sufficient advancement in due time....
I have not exhibited myself at a public dance. My master, who is a
very sensible fellow, advising me against it, as he observed that a
person seldom loses the character which he obtains from the first
impressions; but we have agreed that I may venture at the next
_pique nique_.
On the alternate Sundays we have a dance: either a tea dance or
a supper dance; one from four to eight, and the other from five
to one. This is called a _pique nique_, and in its constitution
resembles a Scotch oyster dance.
Soon after, to his uncle, he says:
Blumenbach has shown me many civilities, but I am most at home
at Arnemann’s, under whose roof I live, and who has been long in
Britain, and brought an English wife home with him. You need not be
afraid of my following his example and marrying a German lady. I am
not likely to lose my heart here, though there are some tolerably
agreeable girls with whom I wish to be more acquainted for the sake
of exercise in the language; for conversation with women gives both
a fluency of expression and a delicacy of manners which are never
to be learned from men.
On April 30 he passed his examination before the Medical Faculty.
I made [says he] no preparatory study, as is usual here, and
also at Edinburgh not uncommon, under the name of grinding. The
examination lasted between four and five hours. The four examiners
were seated round a table, well furnished with cakes, sweetmeats,
and wine, which helped to pass the time agreeably. The questions
were well calculated to sound the depth of a student’s knowledge
in practical physics, surgery, anatomy, chemistry, materia medica,
and physiology; but the professors were not very severe in exacting
accurate answers. Most of them were pleased to express their
approbation of my replies. We were all previously obliged to give a
summary account of the manner in which our lives had been spent.
He wrote to his uncle towards the close of his residence in Göttingen
thus:
I have this morning been upon the back of the Springer. To mount
this terrestrial Pegasus is considered here something like
_Summos in re equestri honores_, and is seldom attained without
long practice. I finish my lessons this week and look back with
satisfaction on the health and amusement which have repaid
my time and money. It might, perhaps, be more useful to me to
take some instruction how to sit in a doctor’s chariot; but it
is impossible to possess any qualification which one may not
want, and capabilities are but light burdens. We have another
fashionable exercise, which I think adequately corresponds to the
athletic schools of the ancients--vaulting on a wooden horse in
various positions--and I am much more known among the students for
excelling in this than for writing Greek, of which they have little
knowledge and not much more respect.
After being nine months at Göttingen he returned by Brunswick, Gotha,
Weimar, Jena, Dresden, and Berlin to England in February 1797. At
Brunswick he had a favourable opportunity of exhibiting his personal
agility at a court masquerade, where he made his appearance with great
success in the character of Harlequin.
From Berlin he wrote, December 12, to his uncle: ‘You say my Thesis
(for his medical degree, on the conservative forces of the human body)
is caviare to the general; but do not you think people have a greater
respect for anything out of the common way? It seems a fatality that
almost everything I do, or produce, should be termed stiff; in this
case it may arise from my having been obliged to treat the subject in a
short compass.’
Finding, when he came back from Germany, that the College of Physicians
of London required two years’ continuous attendance at one university
for a licence to practise, and shut out from the Fellowship all who
were not graduates at Cambridge or Oxford, he went as fellow-commoner
to Emmanuel College, Cambridge; and the account given by one who was
afterwards tutor of the college brings the Professor of the Royal
Institution most clearly into view.
When the Master [says the writer] introduced Young to his tutors,
he jocularly said, ‘I have brought you a pupil qualified to read
lectures to his tutors.’ This, however, as might be concluded,
he did not attempt; and the forbearance was mutual: he was never
required to attend the common duties of the College.
He had a high character for classical learning before he came to
Cambridge; but I believe he did not pursue his classical studies
in the latter part of his life--he seldom spoke of them, but I
remember his meeting Dr. Parr in the College Combination Room;
and when the Doctor had made, as was not unusual with him, some
dogmatical observation on a point of scholarship, Young said
firmly, ‘Bently, sir, was of a different opinion,’ immediately
quoting his authority and showing his intimate knowledge of the
subject. Parr said nothing, but when Dr. Young retired asked who he
was, and, though he did not seem to have heard his name before, he
said, ‘A smart young man that.’
He had a great talent for Greek verse, and on one occasion I
remember a young lady had written on the walls of the summer-house
in the garden the following lines:--
Where are these hours on airy pinions borne,
That brought to every guiltless wish success,
When pleasure gladdened each succeeding morn,
And every evening closed with dreams of peace?
On the next morning appeared a translation in Greek elegiacs,
written under them in Young’s beautiful characters.
It may be here mentioned that when his mode of writing Greek was
laid before Porson, he said that if he had seen it before he would
have adopted it.
The views, objects, character, and arguments of our mathematicians
were very different then to what they are now, and Young, who was
certainly beforehand with the world, perceived their defects.
Certain it is that he looked down upon the science, and would not
cultivate the acquaintance of any of our philosophers. Wood’s books
I have heard him speak of with approbation, but Vince he treated
with contempt, and Vince afterwards returned the compliment.
He never obtruded his various learning in conversation, but if
appealed to on the most difficult subject he answered in a quick,
flippant, derisive way, as if he was speaking of the most easy;
and in this mode of talking he differed from all the clever men
that I ever saw. His reply never seemed to cost him an effort,
and he did not appear to think there was any credit in being able
to make it. He did not assert any superiority, or seem to suppose
that he possessed it, but spoke as if he took it for granted that
we all understood the matter as well as he did. He never spoke in
praise of any of the writers of the day, even in his own particular
department, and could not be persuaded to discuss their merits. He
was never personal; he would speak of knowledge in itself of what
was known or what might be known, but never of himself or any other
as having deserved anything, or as likely to do so.
His language was correct, his utterance rapid, and his sentences,
though without any affectation, never left unfinished; but his
words were not those in familiar use, and the arrangement of
his ideas seldom the same as those he conversed with. He was,
therefore, worse calculated than any man I ever knew for the
communication of knowledge.
I remember his taking me with him to the Royal Institution to hear
him lecture to a number of silly women and dilettante philosophers.
But nothing could show less judgment than the method he adopted;
for he presumed, like many other lecturers and preachers, on the
knowledge, and not on the ignorance, of his hearers.
In his manners he had something of the stiffness of the Quaker
remaining, and, though he never said or did a rude thing, he never
made use of any of the forms of politeness. Not that he avoided
them through affectation; his behaviour was natural, without
timidity, and easy without boldness. He rarely associated with
the young men of the College, who called him, with a mixture of
derision and respect, ‘Phenomenon Young,’ but he lived on familiar
terms with the Fellows in the Common Room. He had few friends of
his own age or pursuits in the University, and not having been
introduced to many of those who were distinguished either by their
situation or talent, he did not seek their society, nor did they
seek him; they did not like to admit the superiority of anyone in
_statu pupillari_, and he would not converse with anyone but as an
equal.
It is difficult to say how he employed himself; he read little, and
though he had access to the College and University libraries he was
seldom seen in them. There were no books piled on his floor, no
papers scattered on his table, and his room had all the appearance
of belonging to an idle man.
I once found him blowing smoke through long tubes, and I afterwards
saw a representation of the effect in the ‘Transactions of the
Royal Society,’ to illustrate one of his papers upon sound; but
he was not in the habit of making experiments. He walked little
and rode less; but, having learnt to ride the great horse abroad,
he used to _pace_ round Parker’s Piece on a hackney: he once made
an attempt to follow the hounds, but a severe fall prevented any
future exhibition.
He seldom gave an opinion, and never volunteered one. He never laid
down the law like other learned doctors, or uttered apophthegms
or sayings to be remembered. Indeed, like most mathematicians
(though we hear of abstract mathematics), he never seemed to think
abstractedly. A philosophical fact, a difficult calculation,
an ingenious instrument, or a new invention, would engage his
attention; but he never spoke of morals, of metaphysics, or of
religion. Of the last I never heard him say a word, nothing in
favour of any sect, or in opposition to any doctrine; at the same
time, no sceptical doubt, no loose assertion, no idle scoff, ever
escaped him.
On July 8, 1799, he sent from Emmanuel College a paper to the Royal
Society, entitled ‘Outlines of Experiments and Inquiries respecting
Sound and Light.’ In it he established the great principle of the
interference of sounds, and he wrote one section on the analogy of
sound and light. In 1800 he referred, in the ‘British Magazine,’ to a
young gentleman of Edinburgh ‘who certainly promises, in the course of
time, to add considerably to our knowledge of the works of nature, but
who had a paper in the “Philosophical Transactions” for 1798, in which
what was new was not true, and what was true was not new.’ Dr. Robison,
in his article on Music in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ criticised
Young’s papers. In Nicholson’s ‘Philosophical Journal’ for 1801
Young answered Robison, and published an extension of the principles
of interferences from sound to light. This was the preliminary
announcement of his views regarding the undulatory theory of light.
His first paper on the ‘Theory of Light and Colours’ was read to the
Royal Society, November 12, 1801. His second paper on this subject was
read July 1, 1802, and his third November 24, 1803. His ‘Syllabus of
Lectures at the Royal Institution,’ dated January 19, 1802, p. 116,
gives the first printed account of his views. He says, ‘Speaking
of Newton’s views, it will be sufficient for our present purpose to
enumerate the respective explanations of the principal phenomena
of light as they are furnished by the Newtonian system, and by the
theory lately submitted to the Royal Society’; and (p. 117) he says,
‘The colours of thin and of thick plates, and the fringes produced by
inflection, are referred by Newton to the very complicated effects
of an undulating medium on the corpuscles of light, but without any
attempt to accommodate the explanations to the measures obtained from
his own accurate and elegant experiments; those of striated surfaces
he has not noticed. But the general law by which all these appearances
are governed may be very easily deduced from the interference of two
coincident undulations which either co-operate or destroy each other in
the same manner as two musical notes produce an alternate intermission
and remission in the beating of an imperfect unison.’
‘The young gentleman of Edinburgh,’ afterwards known as Lord Brougham,
in the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ January 1803, criticised the Royal Society
papers.
It is difficult [he said] to argue with an author whose mind is
filled with a medium of so fickle and vibratory a nature. Were we
to take the trouble to refute him, he might tell us, _My opinion
is changed_, and _I have abandoned that hypothesis, but here is
another for you_. We demand if the world of science which Newton
once illuminated is to be as changeable in its modes as the world
of taste, which is directed by the nod of a silly woman or a
pampered fop? Has the Royal Society degraded its publications into
bulletins of new and fashionable theories for the ladies who attend
the Royal Institution? _Proh pudor!_ Let the Professor continue
to amuse his audience with an endless variety of such harmless
trifles, but, in the name of science, let them not find admittance
into that venerable repository which contains the works of Newton,
and Boyle, and Cavendish, and Maskelyne, and Herschel.
Young’s most famous experiment of stopping the rays which passed on one
side of a thin card exposed to a sunbeam in a dark chamber Brougham
threw aside, with the assertion that the experiment was inaccurately
made. Dr. Young replied:
The reviewer has here afforded me an opportunity for a triumph, as
gratifying as any triumph can be where an enemy is so contemptible.
Conscious of inability to explain the experiment, too ungenerous to
confess that inability, and too idle to repeat the experiment, he
is compelled to advance the supposition that it was incorrect. ‘Let
him make the experiment, and then deny the result if he can.’
He took no special means to make his answer known, and only one copy
of his reply was sold. The poison sank deep into the public mind, and
Dr. Young’s researches remained comparatively unnoticed until Arago, in
1815, when reporting upon the optical discoveries of Fresnel, showed
that a greater discoverer than Newton had anticipated the researches of
the French philosopher.
Dr. Young gives the following account of his discovery of the general
law of the interference of light:
It was in May 1801 that I discovered, by reflecting on the
beautiful experiments of Newton, a law which appears to me to
account for a greater variety of interesting phenomena, than any
other optical principle that has yet been made known. I shall
endeavour to explain this law by a comparison:--Suppose a number of
equal waves of water to move upon the surface of a stagnant lake,
with a certain constant velocity, and to enter a narrow channel
leading out of the lake; suppose, then, another similar cause to
have existed, another equal series of waves will arrive at the
same channel with the same velocity, and at the same time with
the first. Neither series of waves will destroy the other, but
their effects will be combined. If they enter the channel in such
a manner that the elevations of one series coincide with those of
the other, they must together produce a series of greater joint
elevations; but if the elevations of one series are so situated as
to correspond to the depressions of the other, they must exactly
fill up those depressions, and the surface of the water must remain
smooth; at least I can discover no alternative either from theory
or from experiment.
Now I maintain that similar effects take place whenever two
portions of light are thus mixed, and this I call the general law
of the interference of light.
Within three months he became Professor at the Royal Institution.
In 1801, on the 6th of July, Count Rumford reported to the managers
that, ‘at the recommendation of Sir Joseph Banks, he had had a
conversation with Dr. Young respecting his engaging as Professor of
Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution and Editor of the Journals,
together with a general superintendency of the house, and it appearing
from the report of Count Rumford that Dr. Young is a man of abilities
equal to these undertakings, it was resolved that Count Rumford be
authorised to engage Dr. Young in the aforesaid capacities at a salary
of 300_l._ per annum.’[23]
On August 3, at the managers’ meeting (Count Rumford in the chair;
present, Henry Cavendish, R. J. Sullivan; secretary J. P. Auriol),
Count Rumford reported that, agreeably to the authority granted him by
the managers, he had engaged Dr. Thomas Young. A copy of his letter to
Dr. Young, expressing the conditions of his engagement, was at the same
time laid before the committee.
The first number of the Journal had been published by Rumford on April
5, 1800. Dr. Young alone edited the fourth number in the autumn of
1801, the fifth number in December 1801, and, after editing two more
numbers alone, he joined with Davy in the editorship till the Journal
stopped in 1803.
On January 19 Dr. Young printed, at the press of the Royal Institution,
a syllabus of his first course of lectures.
The first part was on Natural Philosophy; the second part on
Hydrodynamics; the third part on Physics; and the fourth part on
Mathematical Elements.
Each had a Greek or Latin motto prefixed, and the following
advertisement to the first part was printed:
In order to adapt the delivery of these lectures as much as
possible to the convenience of different persons who may be
disposed to attend them, they will be divided into three parts
of nearly equal magnitude, and in great measure independent of
each other. Two parts will be delivered in succession on Mondays
and Wednesdays, at two o’clock, and the third on Friday evenings
at eight. And in future winters, each part will be taken in turn
for the evening lecture, so that the whole course may be heard at
either hour. The fourth part contains all the preliminary knowledge
that is necessary for those who may wish to enter mathematically
on the various subjects of the lectures; it will save considerable
pains in consulting other authors, and the most experienced may
often find it convenient for occasional reference. It was the
more desirable that something of this kind should be inserted, as
mathematical arguments will be avoided as much as possible in the
lectures; and for this reason the demonstrations which occur in the
syllabus are distinguished from the principal text by a smaller
type, and a separate place in the page. In a future edition a fifth
part will probably be added, containing a catalogue of the best
authors, with references to their works upon each subject. One
acknowledgment must, however, be inserted here for the extensive
use that has been made of the valuable articles contributed by
Professor Robison to the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica.’
Royal Institution, Albemarle Street,
January 19, 1802.
The volume forms an octavo of upwards of 250 pages; and it is quite
evidence enough that the matter, no less than the manner of the
lectures of Dr. Young, were more fitted for Cambridge than for the
Royal Institution.
Dr. Paris thus contrasts Davy’s manner with that of Young:
To judge fairly of the influence of a popular style we should
acquaint ourselves with the effects of an opposite method, and, if
an appeal be made to experience, I may very safely abide the issue.
Dr. Young, whose profound knowledge of the subjects he taught no
one will venture to question, lectured in the same theatre, and to
an audience similarly constituted to that which was attracted by
Davy, but he found the number of his attendants diminish daily, and
for no other reason than that he adopted too severe and didactic a
style.
The first afternoon lecture was given by Dr. Young, on Wednesday,
January 20, 1802, and the first evening lecture on Friday, January 22.
At the commencement he gave an introductory view of the nature and
objects of the Royal Institution and of the particular plan of the
lectures. Afterwards he proceeded to the subject of mechanics with the
doctrine of motion.
In the introductory lecture, when dwelling on the objects of the Royal
Institution and the dissemination of elementary knowledge, he said:
Those who possess the genuine spirit of scientific investigation,
and who have tasted the pure satisfaction arising from an
advancement in intellectual acquirements, are content to proceed
in their researches without inquiring at every step what they gain
by their newly-discovered lights, and to what practical purposes
they are applicable; they receive a sufficient gratification from
the enlargement of their views of the constitution of the universe,
and experience in the immediate pursuit of knowledge that pleasure
which others wish to obtain more circuitously by its means. And it
is one of the principal advantages of a liberal education that it
creates a susceptibility of an enjoyment so elegant and so rational.
On the subject of the education of females at the Royal Institution he
said:
The many leisure hours which are at the command of females in the
superior orders of society may surely be appropriated with greater
satisfaction to the improvement of the mind, and to the acquisition
of knowledge, than to such amusements as are only designed for
facilitating the insipid consumption of superfluous time.
The Royal Institution may in some degree supply the place of a
subordinate university to those whose sex or situation in life
has denied them the advantage of an academical education in the
national seminaries of learning.
With regard to the special objects of the Institution, the theory of
practical mechanics and of manufactures, he said:
We must be more practical than academies of science and more
theoretical than societies for the improvement of arts; while we
endeavour at the same time to give stability to our proceedings
by an annual recurrence to the elementary knowledge which is
subservient to the purposes of both and, as far as we are able,
apply to practice the newest lights which may from time to time be
thrown on particular branches of mechanical science. It is thus
that we may most effectually perform what the idolised sophists of
antiquity but verbally professed--to bring down philosophy from the
heavens and to make her an inhabitant of the earth.
We may venture to affirm that out of every hundred of fancied
improvements in arts or in machines ninety at least, if not
ninety-nine, are either old or useless; the object of our
researches is to enable ourselves to distinguish and to adopt the
hundredth. But, while we prune the luxuriant shoots of youthful
invention, we must remember to perform our task with leniency,
and to show that we wish only to give additional vigour to the
healthful branches, and not to extirpate the parent plant.
He spoke of the repository of models as being a supplementary room for
apparatus exhibited and described in the lectures, and ‘where a few
other articles may perhaps deserve admission.’ He mentioned the library
and the Journals as free from commercial shackles, but made no mention
of the workshops nor of the education of artisans.
When all the advantages which may reasonably be expected from this
Institution shall be fully understood and impartially considered,
it is to be hoped that few persons of liberal minds will be
indifferent to its success or unwilling to contribute to it and to
participate in it.
To that regulation which forbids the introduction of any
discussions connected with the learned professions I shall always
most willingly submit and most punctually attend. It requires the
study of a considerable portion of a man’s life to qualify him
to be of use to mankind in any of them, and nothing can be more
pernicious to individuals or to society than the attempting to
proceed practically upon an imperfect conception of a few first
principles only. In physic the wisest can do but little, and the
ignorant can only do worse than nothing; and anxiously as we are
disposed to seek whatever relief the learned and experienced may be
able to afford us, so cautiously ought we to avoid the mischievous
interference of the half-studied empiric. In politics and in
religion we need but to look back on the history of kingdoms and
republics, in order to be aware of the mischiefs which ensue when
fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
With regard to his prospectus and lectures he said:
For the sake of those who are not disposed to undertake the labour
of following with mathematical accuracy all the steps of the
demonstrations on which the doctrines of the mechanical sciences
are founded, I shall endeavour to avoid in the whole of this
course of lectures every intricacy which might be perplexing to
a beginner, and every argument which is fitter for the closet
than for a public theatre. Here I propose to support the same
propositions by experimental proofs, not that I consider such
proofs as the most conclusive, or as more interesting to a truly
philosophic mind, than a deduction from general principles, but
because there is a satisfaction in discovering the coincidence
of theories with visible effects, and because objects of sense
are of advantage in assisting the imagination to comprehend,
and the memory to retain, what in a more abstracted form might
fail to excite sufficient attention. With regard to the mode of
delivering these lectures, I shall in general entreat my audience
to pardon the formality of a written discourse in favour of the
advantage of a superior degree of order and perspicuity. It would
unquestionably be desirable that every syllable advanced should
be rendered perfectly easy and comprehensible even to the most
uninformed, that the most inattentive might find sufficient variety
and entertainment in what is submitted to them to excite their
curiosity, and that in all cases the pleasing, and sometimes even
the surprising, should be united with the instructive and the
important. But, whenever there appears to be a real impossibility
of reconciling these various objects, I shall esteem it better to
seek for substantial utility than temporary amusement; for if we
fail of being useful, for want of being sufficiently popular, we
remain at least respectable; but if we are unsuccessful in our
attempts to amuse, we immediately appear trifling and contemptible.
It shall, however, at all times be my endeavour to avoid each
extreme, and I trust that I shall then only be condemned when I am
found abstruse from ostentation or uninteresting from supineness.
The most difficult thing for a teacher is to recollect how much
it cost himself to learn, and to accommodate his instruction
to the apprehension of the uninformed. By bearing in mind this
observation I hope to be able to render my lectures more and more
intelligible and familiar, not by passing over difficulties, but
by endeavouring to facilitate the task of overcoming them; and if
at any time I appear to have failed in this attempt, I shall think
myself honoured by any subsequent inquiries that my audience may be
disposed to make.
The division of the whole course of lectures into three parts
was originally suggested by the periodical succession in which
the appointed hours recur, but it appears to be more convenient
than any other for the regular classification of the subjects. The
general doctrines of motion and their application to all purposes,
variable at pleasure, supply the materials of the first two parts,
of which the one treats of the motions of solid bodies and the
other of those of fluids, including the theory of light. The
third part relates to the particular history of the phenomena of
nature, and of the affections of bodies actually existing in the
universe independently of the art of man, comprehending astronomy,
geography, and the doctrine of the properties of matter, and of the
most general and powerful agents that influence it.
The synthetical order of proceeding from simple and general
principles to their more intimate combinations in particular cases,
is by far the most compendious for conveying information with
regard to sciences that are at all referable to certain fundamental
laws. For these laws being once established, each fact, as soon as
it is known, assumes its place in the system, and is retained in
the memory by its relation to the rest as a connecting link. In the
analytical mode, on the contrary, which is absolutely necessary
for the first investigation of truth, we are obliged to begin by
collecting a number of insulated circumstances, which lead us back
by degrees to the knowledge of original principles, but which,
until we arrive at these principles, are merely a burden to the
memory. For the phenomena of nature resemble the scattered leaves
of the Sibylline prophecies; a word only, or a single syllable, is
written on each leaf, which, when separately considered, conveys
no instruction to the mind, but when, by the labour of patient
investigation, every fragment is replaced in its appropriate
connexion, the whole begins at once to speak a perspicuous and a
harmonious language.
On July 5 he requested leave of the managers to be absent during the
months of August and September, taking care in the meantime to provide
sufficient matter for the publication of the Journals. He went with
the late Duke of Richmond and his brother to France. At Paris he was
introduced to the First Consul at the Institute.
This year he was appointed foreign secretary of the Royal Society,
and he held this office for the remainder of his life. He refused the
appointment of secretary in 1812, because he thought it would interfere
with his medical reputation.
In 1803, on January 26, the lectures at the Institution recommenced.
Young and Davy each gave weekly two day lectures and one evening
lecture. On Tuesday and Friday the lectures were in the evening.
On February 21 Young proposed his preface[24] to the second volume of
the Journal of the Institution.
This year, in March, he took his first Cambridge medical degree; he did
not receive his degree as Doctor of Medicine until 1808.
On July 4 the engagement of Dr. Young with the Royal Institution
terminated.[25]
On October 3 he was elected a subscriber for life for his services to
the Institution.
On November 6 he wrote to the managers:
40 Welbeck Street.
I beg to return you my sincere thanks for the privileges of a life
subscriber to the Royal Institution, which you have conferred
upon me. I consider this honour both as a flattering mark of your
approbation of the unremitting attention which it was my endeavour
to pay to the objects of the Institution while I was employed in
its service, and as a substantial advantage in giving me access to
a collection of books so valuable as that which is now forming in
it. For this privilege I cannot show my gratitude better than by
endeavouring to make such use of it as to render the publication
of my lectures, which I am preparing, more and more worthy of
the Institution in which they were delivered, and fitted to
co-operate in its exertions for the advancement and dissemination
of mechanical knowledge.
After this time Dr. Young took no part in the progress of the Royal
Institution. A very short sketch of the remainder of his life,
therefore, will be given.
When between thirty-one and forty-one years of age he used his utmost
endeavours to succeed in practice in Welbeck Street. In 1804 he
married, and he built a house at Worthing, where he practised in the
autumn for sixteen years. In 1807 he tried to become physician to
the Middlesex Hospital. In this he failed, but he lectured there on
Chemistry, Physiology, Nosology, Practice of Medicine, and Materia
Medica. Many of the lectures formed afterwards part of his work on
‘Medical Literature.’
This year he published his ‘Course of Lectures at the Royal Institution’
in two quarto volumes. The long delay was occasioned partly from the
increase of matter and partly from the difficulty of the engravings.
Through the bankruptcy of his publisher, Johnson, he lost the
1,000_l._ he was to receive for his work. The Dean of Ely says of
these volumes: ‘They form altogether the most comprehensive system of
natural philosophy and of what the French call physics that has ever
been published in this country; equally remarkable for precision and
accuracy in the enunciation of the vast multitude of propositions and
facts which they contain, for the boldness with which they enter upon
the discussion of the most abstruse and difficult subjects, and for
the addition or suggestion of new matter or new views in almost every
department of philosophy.’
In the autumn of 1810 he wrote to Sir Joseph Banks an account of ‘an
agricultural micrometer for measuring the fineness of wool.’ See
Appendix II.
On January 24, 1811, he was elected one of the physicians of St.
George’s Hospital. The contest, he says, was almost unparalleled.
‘The Cabbells were very naturally confident of triumphant success;
parliamentary influence and the natural wish to serve a man who is
likely to be Lord Chancellor made Sir S. Romilly’s nephew, Dr. Roget,
very formidable.’ ‘Mrs. Young has emerged from death to life by the
event of this contest.’ Before and after this time he wrote frequently
for the ‘Quarterly Review,’ to which he contributed eighteen articles.
Perhaps the most celebrated was on the ‘Herculanean Manuscripts,’ of
which eighteen hundred were discovered. ‘It is a consolation to know,’
said a friend, ‘that Brougham, who took advantage of the growing
circulation of the ‘Edinburgh Review’ to desseminate his vile abuse of
you, and Jeffery, who permitted him to do so, should be condemned to
hear your praises on all sides, and to feel that the publication in
which they are engaged is suffering, and is likely to suffer, by your
means.’
In 1814 he was asked to contribute to the new supplement of the
‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ but he declined, because ‘it was necessary
to abstain as much as possible from appearing before the public as an
author in any department of science not immediately medical.’
During the next ten years of Dr. Young’s life the failure of his
efforts to succeed as a physician led him to the highest literary
success that could be attained.
In 1814 he began his ‘Hieroglyphical Researches,’ and throughout the
summer and autumn he worked at the Rosetta Stone.
At the end of the year he wrote to Mr. Hudson Gurney, who had got him
Champollion’s book--‘Egypt under the Pharaohs:’ ‘I have only spent
literally five minutes in looking over Champollion, turning by means of
the index to the parts where he has quoted the inscription of Rosetta.
He follows Akerblad (a Swedish attaché at Paris, a good classical and
first-rate Coptic scholar, who had written a letter on this stone to
Silvestre de Sacy) blindly, with scarcely any acknowledgment. But he
has certainly picked out the sense of a few passages in the inscription
by means of Akerblad’s investigations, although in four or five Coptic
words which he pretends to have found in it he is wrong in all but
one, and that is a very short and a very obvious one. My translation
is printed; it is anonymous, and must for some time remain so, but
everybody whose approbation is worth having will know the author.’ In
the summer of this year Arago and Gay-Lussac visited him at Worthing.
Young then learned what Fresnel was doing on the diffraction of light,
and they saw what Young had published in his lectures in 1807.
In 1816 he proposed to the editor of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’
to write for him. He says: ‘I would also suggest (in addition to
sound) alphabet, annuities, attraction, capillary action, cohesion,
colour, dew, Egypt, eye, forms, friction, halo, hieroglyphics,
hydraulics, motion, resistance, ship, strength, tides, and waves.
Anything of a medical nature which you might think desirable would
of course be doubly so to me. Nor should I be difficult with respect
to any other subject that might occur to you. L’alti non temo, e
l’umili non sdegno.’ He contributed sixty-three articles; forty-six
were biographical. This year he published his ‘Translation of the
Hieroglyphics’ with a correspondence with De Sacy and Akerblad.
In 1818 he wrote the article ‘Egypt’ for the Encyclopædia. ‘It was
pronounced to be the greatest effort of scholarship and ingenuity of
which modern literature could boast; yet it was only a popular and
superficial sketch of the vast mass of materials which his diligence
had collected and his genius had interpreted.’
He was this year appointed superintendent of the ‘Nautical Almanac’
and secretary of the Board of Longitude, which was established to
relieve the Astronomer Royal from all scientific questions regarding
the interests of navigation. He immediately set himself to correct all
the errors of the Almanac that endangered the safety of ships, but,
considering it as intended for nautical and not astronomical use, he
resisted the changes which practical astronomers strongly urged on him
and on the Government.
In 1822 he wrote to Mr. Gurney from Paris:
In my own pursuits I have found abundance of novelty to interest
me, both the scientific and literary departments of the Institute
happening at this moment to be particularly engaged with my
investigations, and a Frenchman having in each of them been engaged
in going over my own ground without being fully acquainted with
what I had done, and having had to exclaim, ‘Pereant qui ante nos
nostra dixerunt.’ Fresnel, a young mathematician of the civil
engineers, has really been doing some good things in the extension
and application of my theory of light, and Champollion, the author
of the book you brought over, has been working still harder upon
the Egyptian characters. He devotes his whole time to the pursuit,
and he has been wonderfully successful in some of the documents
which he has obtained.
How far he will acknowledge everything which he has either borrowed
or might have borrowed from me, I am not quite confident, but the
world will be sure to remark que c’est le premier pas qui coûte,
though the proverb is less true in this case than in most others,
for here every step is laborious.
The best comparative estimate of the value of the work of Young and
Fresnel on light was given by Sir John Herschel, in 1827, at the end
of his view of the undulating theory of light in the ‘Encyclopædia
Metropolitana’:
Such is the beautiful theory of Fresnel and Young, for we must not,
in our regard for one great name, forget the justice which is
due to the other; and to separate them, and to assign to each his
share, would be as impracticable as invidious, so intimately are
they blended together throughout every part of this system--early,
acute, and pregnant suggestion characterising the one, and maturity
of thought, fulness of systematic development, and decisive
experimental illustration equally distinguishing the other.
During the last five years of Dr. Young’s life, when he was between
fifty-one and fifty-six years old, he ceased to be a practising
physician, and occupied himself with science and literature only.
In 1827, at the anniversary of the Royal Society, after the resignation
of the presidency by Sir Humphry Davy, the claims of Dr. Young were too
strong to be altogether neglected.
Writing to his sister he says:
I find there has been pretty general conversation about making
me President of the Royal Society, and I really think if I were
foolish enough to wish for the office, I am at this _moment_
popular enough to obtain it; but you well know that nothing is
further from my wishes.
Davies Gilbert was chosen. ‘I told him,’ says Young, ‘that he had not
quite enough of the devil in him, that Sir Joseph Banks should have
left his _eyebrows_ to go with his cocked hat, if he had left the
Society nothing else.’
In the summer of 1828 he visited Paris for the last time on his way to
Geneva. He was then one of the eight foreign associates of the Academy.
To Mr. Gurney he wrote:
My principal object was Champollion, and with him I have been
completely successful as far as I wanted his _assistance_, for, to
say the truth, our conferences have not been very gratifying to my
_vanity_. He has done so much more and so much better than I had
any reason to believe he would or could have done, and, as he feels
his own importance more, he feels less occasion to be tenacious of
any trifling claims which may justly be denied him, and in this
spirit he has borne my criticisms with perfect good humour, though
Arago has charged me with some degree of undue severity, and wanted
to pass the matter over as not having been published as mine; but
to this I could not consent: and, supposing that Champollion might
have been unacquainted with the remarks, I thought it a matter of
conscience to carry them to him this morning, before I allowed him
to continue his profuse liberality in furnishing me with more than
I want.
From Geneva Young sent Arago, at his request, a statement of his
claims. He gave full justice to Champollion. But when Arago, a few
years later, read his éloge of Young, he still said that Young’s
principle of phonetisation of the hieroglyphics was mixed with error,
chiefly by making symbols stand for words and syllables, instead of for
letters only. He also denied Young’s knowledge of two or more signs for
the same letter.
His health up to this time, with the exception before mentioned, had
been perfect. During this summer excursion he was most easily fatigued,
and appeared to age rapidly.
In a letter written soon after his return he says:
As for myself, I am perfectly content with the life I lead--walking
on business of routine every day from eleven to two, the rest
of the day sitting over my hieroglyphics, or my mathematics,
and conversing in my library with people beyond the Alps or the
Mediterranean. I have lost all ambition for a more bustling life,
or more active scenes, and I believe I am as happy as a person so
old in _soul_ is capable of being. In mental faculties I am not
yet old, and I amuse myself almost daily with some petty bonnes
fortunes among some of the nine sisters. I hear nothing whatever
from the Admiralty, and so much the better, except receiving
300_l._ a year instead of four. As for Croker, I never believe
a word of his going out, and he may remain in for aught I care,
and be Lord Melville’s master if he chooses; for the stronger of
two heads will generally direct the weaker in the long run. I am
deep in the value of life, and I really begin to think that people
do live longer than was formerly supposed, though not in the
extravagant degree that was asserted.
In 1828, at the Royal Society, when the President, Davies Gilbert,
announced Wollaston’s donation of 2,000_l._ for the promotion of
scientific research and his own gift of 1,000_l._, Young, as senior
officer, returned thanks for the Society. He tells Mr. Gurney, ‘I
summoned up courage to take the first opportunity of muttering out,
“Mr. President, a gentleman on my right says he never heard me make a
speech.”’
In January 1829 he wrote:
Our new Committee of Longitude is settled, at least for the
present, though the radical abuse of the ‘Nautical Almanac’ is
likely to continue; but, fortunately for my security, they have
put the Admiralty and the ‘Nautical Almanac’ together; so they may
do their worst. Croker has appointed Sabine and Faraday and me to
constitute a scientific committee to advise the Admiralty, which
was all that the Board of Longitude would do, and it is better that
things should be called by their right names.
Immediately a memorial was sent to the Prime Minister, the Duke of
Wellington, against the ‘Nautical Almanac.’ A report on this paper was
made by Dr. Young in February.
Though his health was at this time rapidly declining, his
observations were written with his usual precision and ability,
giving way in one instance only to feelings of personal resentment,
if a stronger term may not be used, which had been provoked by
attacks of unusual violence and bitterness. It is hardly necessary
to add that he adhered substantially to the views which he had
previously maintained. His death, which took place on May 10, put
an end to the contest.
The life of Dr. Young began, continued, and ended strangely. Throughout
he was a phenomenon. His course was very different from what might have
been expected and quite opposed to that which would have been most
suited to him.
He was the great physicist of his time, and yet ‘at no period of his
life was he fond of repeating experiments or even of originating new
ones. He considered that, however necessary to the advancement of
science, they demanded a great sacrifice of time; and that, when a fact
was once established, that time was better employed in considering the
purposes to which it might be applied or the principles which it might
tend to elucidate.’ He was kind by nature and a Quaker by education,
and yet he was always at war for his discoveries. He never was free
from a scientific or literary controversy. As a professor at the Royal
Institution, as a hospital physician at St. George’s, and still more
as a practitioner of medicine in London and Worthing, his powers were
entirely misdirected. With a culture like that of Newton what noble
fruit might not Young have brought forth! The work he did for science
was undervalued during his life; nevertheless he was content; and
nothing shows that he foresaw or wished for that great reputation which
has gradually gathered round his name. Two years before his death,
writing to his sister-in-law regarding the praise which Herschel had
given him in his ‘Treatise on Light,’ he said:
I think he has divided the prize very fairly, and I dare say poor
Fresnel, if he had lived, would have preferred his share of the
honour as much as I do mine. It was _before I knew you_ that mine
was earned, and acute suggestion was then--and indeed always--more
in the line of my ambition than experimental illustration. But
surely one that is conscious that such things may be said with
some truth (or who imagines it) has no further temptation to be
President of the Royal Society even if he could.
His character was drawn by Sir Humphry Davy thus: ‘A man of universal
erudition and almost universal accomplishments. Had he limited himself
to any one department of knowledge he must have been first in that
department. But as a mathematician, a scholar, and hieroglyphist he
was eminent; and he knew so much that it is difficult to say what he
did not know. He was a most amiable and good-tempered man; too fond,
perhaps, of the society of persons of rank for a true philosopher.’
Mr. Davies Gilbert, the President of the Royal Society, in his speech
from the chair on the death of Young, said:
He came into the world with a confidence in his own talents,
growing out of an expectation of excellence entertained in common
by all his friends, which expectation was more than realised in
the progress of his future life. The multiplied objects which he
pursued were carried to such an extent, that each might have been
supposed to have exclusively occupied the full powers of his mind;
knowledge in the abstract, the most enlarged generalisations, and
the most minute and intricate details were equally effected by
him; but he had most pleasure in that which appeared to be most
difficult of investigation. The example is only to be followed by
those of equal perseverance.