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 Géttingen, in 
the following 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 ee name of “ Phenomenon 
Young.”’— Translator. 
