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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 hay- 
* And, it might be added, probably to a far more numerous class 
not of those bodies.— Translator. 
