290 THOMAS YOUNG. 







which he hoped to find fortune and independence. His 

 medical studies were commenced in London under Baillie 

 and Cruikshank ; he continued them at Edinburgh, where 

 at that time Drs. Black, Munro, and Gregory were in the 

 height of their celebrity. It was only at Gottingen, in 

 the follovving year (1795), that he took the degree of 

 Doctor.* Before going through this form, so empty, yet 

 always so imperatively exacted, Young, hardly beyond 

 the period of youth, had become known to the scientific 

 world by a note relative to the gum ladanum ; 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 Fabricius, 

 the whole enriched with erudite researches ; and lastly, 

 by an inquiry on which I will enlarge on account of its 

 great merit, the unusual favour with which it was re- 

 ceived at its first production, and the neglect into which 

 it has since fallen. 



The Royal Society of London 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 honour to deposit its 

 titles to the recognition of posterity. The wish to see 

 his name inscribed in the list of fellow-labourers in this 

 truly national collection, beside the names of Newton, 

 Bradley, Priestley, and Cavendish has always been 



* The author has omitted that, in 1797, Young entered as a fellow- 

 commoner at Emmanuel College, Cambridge ; and in due time gradu- 

 ated there regularly in medicine; a step at that time necessary for his 

 admission to the College of Physicians, in order to enable him to 

 practise as a physician in London. See Peacock's Life, p. 115. In 

 the university he was familiarly known by the name of " Phenomenon 

 Young." Translator. 



