116 EULOGY ON THOMAS YOUNG. 



tbroiigli this form, so empty, yet always so imperatively exacted, Youn^, 

 hardly beyond the period of youth, had become known to the scientific 

 worhl by a note relative to the gum ladauum ; by the controversy which 

 he sustained against Dr. Beddoes on the subject of Crawford's theory 

 of heat; by a memoir on the habits of spiders, and the theory of Fabri- 

 cius, the whole enriched with erudite researches ; and, lastly, by an in- 

 quiry, on which 1 will enlarge on account of its great merit, the unusual 

 favor with w^hich it was received at its hrst production, and the neglect 

 into which it has since fallen. 



The Eoyal Society of Loudon enjoys throughout the whole kingdom 

 a vast and deserved consideration. The Philosophical Transactions 

 which it publishes have been for more than a century and a half the 

 glorious archives in which British genius holds it an honor to deposit 

 its titles to the recognition of posterity. The wish to see his name in- 

 scribed in the list of fellow-laborers in this truly national collection be- 

 side the names of Newton, Bradley, Priestley, and Cavendish, has 

 always been among the students of the celebrated universities of Cam- 

 bridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, and Dublin* the most anxious as wx'll as 

 legitimate object of emulation. Here is always the highest jioint of 

 ambition of the man of science ; he does not aspire to it unless on oc- 

 casion of some capital investigation ; and the first attempts of his youth 

 came before the public by a channel better suited to their importance, by 

 the aid of one of those numerous periodicals which, among our neighbors, 

 have contributed so much to the progress of human knowledge. Such 

 is the ordinary course ; such, consequently, ought not to have been the 

 course followed by Young. At the age of twenty he addressed a paper 

 to the Eoyal Society. The council, composed of the most eminent 

 men of the society, honored this i^aper with their suffrage, and it soon 

 after appeared in the Philosophical Transactions. The author treated in 

 it of the subject of vision. 



THEORY OF VISION. 



The ])roblem was anything but new. Plato and his disciples, four cen- 

 turies before our era, were occupied with it ; but at the present day their 

 conceptions can hardly be cited but to justify the celebrated and little 

 flattering sentence of Cicero: "There is nothing so absurd that it has 

 not been said by some of the jihilosophers." 



After passing over an interval of two thousand years, we must from 

 Greece transport ourselves to Italy, if we should find any ideas on the 

 wonderful subject of vision which merit the remembrance of the histo- 

 rian, where, without having ever, like the philosopher of ^gina, 

 proudly closed their school against all who were not geometers, careful 

 experimenters marked out the sole route by which it is i^ermitted to 

 man to arrive without false steps at the conquest of unknown regions of 

 truth; there Maurolycus and Porta proclaimed to their contemporaries 

 that the problem of discovering what is presents sufiicieut difhculties to 

 render it at least somewhat presumptuous to cast ourselves upon the 

 loorld of intelligences to search after what ought to he ; there these two 

 celebrated fellow-countrymen of Archimedes commenced the explana- 

 tion of the functions of the different media of which the eye is com- 

 posed, and showed themselves contented, as were at a later period 

 Galileo and Newton, not to ascend above those kinds of knowledge 

 which are capable of being elaborated or corrected by the aid of our 



* And, it might be added, probably to a far more numerous class not of those bodies. — 

 Translator. 



