PAPER ON VISION. 291 



among the students of the celebrated universities of 

 Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, and Dublin,* the most 

 anxious as well as legitimate object of emulation. Here 

 is always the highest point of ambition of the man of 

 science ; he does not aspire to it unless on occasion of 

 some capital investigation ; and the first attempts of his 

 youth come before the public by a channel better suited 

 to their importance, by the aid of one of those numerous 

 periodicals which, among our neighbours, have contri- 

 buted 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 Royal Society. 

 The council, composed of the most eminent men of the 

 Society, honoured this paper 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 problem was any thing but new. Plato and his 

 disciples, four centuries 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 phi- 

 losophers." 



After passing over an interval of 2000 years, we must 

 from Greece transport ourselves to Italy, if we would find 

 any ideas on the wonderful subject of vision which merit 

 the remembrance of the historian. Where, without hav- 



* And, it might be added, probably to a far more numerous class 

 not of those bodies. Translator. 



