224 Biographical Memoir of' Dr Thomas Young. 



by persons of the least intelligence, and not at all accustomed to 

 delicate experiments ; and, armed with this new means of in- 

 vestigation, he convinced himself that all those who had been 

 deprived of their crystalline lens, by its being extracted for ca- 

 taract, did not possess the faculty of seeing distinctly at different 

 distances. 



We may be truly surprised that this admirable theory of vi- 

 sion, this net-work so cunningly wrought, where acute rea- 

 soning and most ingenious experiments so beautifully support 

 each other, does not occupy in science the distinguished place 

 which is due to it : but for the explanation of this anomaly there 

 is no necessity of going very far — and Young was not, as he 

 used often with grief to declare, another Cassander who was pro- 

 claiming new truths, which his ungrateful contemporaries refused 

 to receive. Though less poetic, it would, I believe, be more 

 true to remark that the discoveries of Young have never been 

 known to the great majority of those who would have been able 

 to appreciate them. The physiologists did not read his beauti- 

 ful memoir, for it presupposes more mathematical knowledge 

 than is usually cultivated in the faculties; and the philoso- 

 phers again neglected it, in their turn, because in oral dis- 

 courses or in printed works, the public scarcely requires 

 more than those superficial views which a common mind can 

 grasp without fatigue. In all this, whatever may have been 

 the opinion of our learned colleague, we see nothing pecu- 

 liar ; like all those who sound the greatest depths of science, 

 he has been misunderstood by the crowd ; but the applause of 

 many illustrious men should be his consolation. In a case of 

 this sort, we should not count the suffrages, but should weigh 

 them. 



The most beautiful discovery of Dr Young, and that which 

 will make his name imperishable, was suggested to him by an 

 object apparently very trifling, viz. by those soap-bubbles, so 

 brilliantly coloured, so light, and which, with difficulty escaping 

 from the tobacco-pipe of the school-boy, become the sport of 

 the most imperceptible currents of air. Before such an en- 

 lightened audience as this, the difficulty of producing a phe- 

 nomenon, its rarity, and its usefulness in the arts, are not 

 the necessary indications of its importance in science. I have 



