326 Analysis of Books, tyc. 



tions and habits decided him, upon due consideration, to determine 

 in favour of the practice of physic, as most congenial to his scientific 

 pursuits, and to which the position occupied by his uncle seemed to 

 offer a favourable introduction. 



In this year he communicated to the Royal Society his Observa- 

 tions on Vision, and his Theory of the Muscularity of the Crystalline 

 Lens of the Eye, which became the object of much discussion ; 

 John Hunter laying claim to having previously made the discovery. 

 Dr. Young was soon after elected a fellow of the Royal Society, 

 when he had just completed his twenty- first year ; and in the autumn 

 of 1794 he went to Edinburgh, and attended the lectures of Doctors 

 Black, Munro, and Gregory. 



He now separated himself from the Society of Quakers, and, 

 amidst the most active pursuit of his medical, scientific, and classical 

 labours, still found leisure for cultivating those arts in which his 

 early education had left him deficient. The versatility of his genius 

 reminds us of what has been recorded of the Admirable Crichton. 

 It is said that ' everything, be its nature what it might, was with 

 him a science ; and that whatever he followed, he followed scientifi- 

 cally. Of music he was extremely fond, and of the science of music 

 he rendered himself a master. He had at all times great personal 

 activity, and in youth he delighted in displaying it.' * He diversified 

 his graver studies by cultivating skill in bodily exercises ; took 

 lessons in horsemanship, in which he always had great pleasure ; and 

 practised, under various masters, all sorts of feats of personal agility, 

 in which he excelled to an extraordinary degree.' As a characteristic 

 anecdote, it is recorded that, in instructing himself in a minuet, he 

 made it the subject of a diagram. 



Toward the close of 1795 he went to the University of Gottingen, 

 where he took his doctor's degree, and excited the wonder of that 

 laborious school by his extraordinary attainments and almost incre- 

 dible industry. Here he composed a treatise ' De Corporis Humani 

 Viribus Conservatricibus,' leaving few volumes unconsulted which 

 had any connexion with the subject he was treating. He had pur- 

 posed visiting Italy previously to his return to England, but was 

 prevented by the victories of the French ; he therefore proceeded to 

 Dresden, for the purpose of studying the works of Italian art in the 

 galleries there, and of comparing what he saw with that which he 

 had learnt of them from the lectures of the professors at Gottingen. 

 He also made a short visit to Berlin. 



During his residence in Germany he gained a very general and accu- 

 rate acquaintance with its language and literature, which he kept up 

 throughout his life ; he remarked that he found in Germany a love of 

 new inventions, singularly, and somewhat pedantically, combined with 

 the habit of systematizing old ones, and of giving an importance to things 

 in themselves trifling, which in his case rather confirmed an original 

 habit of dwelling on minutiae more than his subsequent experience led 

 him to think was advantageous/ 



