THOMAS YOUNG. 



A BIOGRAPHY READ AT A PUBLIC SITTING OF THE ACAD- 

 EMY OP SCIENCES THE 26TH OF NOVEMBER, 1832. 



GENTLEMEN, It seems as if death, who is incessantly 

 thinning our ranks, directed his stroke with a fatal pre- 

 dilection, against that class of our body so limited in num- 

 ber, our foreign associates. In a short space of time the 

 Academy has lost from the list of its members, Herschel, 

 whose bold ideas on the structure of the universe have 

 acquired every year more of probability ; Piazzi, who on 

 the first day of the present century presented our solar 

 system with a new planet ; Watt, who, if not the in- 

 ventor of the steam-engine, the inventor having been a 

 Frenchman,* was at least the creator of so many admi- 

 rable contrivances, by the aid of which the little instru- 

 ment of Papin has become the most ingenious, the most 

 useful, the most powerful means of applying industry; 



* This is not the place to enter on the controversy respecting the 

 invention of the steam-engine. It may, however, be remarked, that 

 we may be well content to allow it to remain a question of degree. 

 Every tea-kettle is a steam-engine. A very slight and obvious con- 

 trivance will enable steam to raise a piston. Let any one define what 

 they mean precisely by the term steam-engine, and the question of 

 priority of invention will be easily settled. Translator. 



