Chapter IV (3)

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.