Memoir of the Life of Dr. Thomas Young. 237 
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 
labors, 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 ‘every thing, 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 incred- 
ible 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 ac- 
curate 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 minuti more than his subsequent expe- 
rience led him to think was advantageous. 
Vou. XXII.—No. 2. 
