220 Biographical Memoir ofDr Thomas Young. 



a notice concerning the gum Ladanum ; by the controversy he 

 maintained with Eeddoes on the subject of Crawford's theory of 

 caloric ; by a memoir concerning the habits of spiders, and the 

 system of Fabricius, all of which were enriched by much learn- 

 ed research; and, finally, by a work on which I shall dwell 

 somewhat longer, on account of its great merit, of the extraor- 

 dinary favour with which it was first received, and the great 

 neglect into which it has since fallen. 



The Royal Society of London enjoys, throughout the three 

 kingdoms, a very high and well-merited consideration. The 

 Phihsophical Transactions have been, for a century and a half, 

 the glorious archives in which British genius considers it ho- 

 nourable to deposit its claims to the gratitude of posterity. The 

 desire to see his name inscribed in the list of the contributors to 

 this truly national collection, along with those of Newton, Brad- 

 ley, Triestley, and Cavendish, has ever been, among the stu- 

 dents of the celebrated universities of Cambridge and Oxford, 

 of Edinburgh and Dublin, the most lively as the most legitimate 

 subject of emulation. This, however, is the last limit of the 

 ambition of the man of science ; he aspires to it only on the oc- 

 casion of some first-rate work ; and the early essays of his youth 

 reach the public by a way better fitted to their importance, 

 through the means of those numerous Journals and Reviews, 

 which have so much contributed among our neighbours to the 

 progress of human science. Such is the common course of 

 things; and such, consequently, was not the course of Dr 

 Young. At the age of twenty, he sent a memoir to the Royal 

 Society; the Council, composed of the most illustrious men of 

 the day, honoured the work with its approbation, and it soon 

 appeared in the Transactions of the Society. In it the author 

 treated upon vision. 



The subject was any thing but new. Plato and his disciples, 

 four centuries before the Christian era, were engaged with its 

 consideration : but at present their ideas could be cited for 

 scarcely any other purpose than to justify the celebrated and 

 not very flattering sentence of Cicero, " That no opinion is so 

 absurd as not to have found some philosopher to support it."" 



After an interval of two thousand years, we must transport 

 ourselves from Greece to Italy before we can find any ideas 



