VISION AT DIFFERENT DISTANCES. 297 
We might fairly be astonished that this admirable the- 
ory of vision, this combination so well framed when the 
most ingenious reasonings and experiments lent each 
other mutual support, did not occupy that distinguished 
rank in the science of the country which it deserved. 
But to explain this anomaly, must we necessarily recur 
to a sort of fatality? Was Young then really, as he 
sometimes described himself with vexation, a new Cas- 
sandra, proclaiming incessantly important truths which 
his ungrateful contemporaries refused to receive? We 
should be less poetical, but more true, it seems to me, if 
we remarked that the discoveries of Young were not 
known to the majority of those who would have been 
able to appreciate them. The physiologists did not read 
his able memoir, because in it he presumes upon more 
mathematical knowledge than is usually attained in that 
branch. 
The physicists neglected it in their turn, because in 
oral lectures, or printed works, the public demands little 
more at the present day than superficial notions, which 
an ordinary mind can penetrate without difficulty. In all 
this, whatever our distinguished colleague may have be- 
lieved, we perceive nothing out of the ordinary course. 
Like all those who sound the greatest depths of science, 
he was misunderstood by the multitude; but the applauses 
of some of the select few ought to have recompensed him. 
In such a question we ought not to count the suffrages ;— 
it is more wise to weigh them.* 
* Arago, in assigning the probable causes of the neglect of Young’s 
speculations, seems to fall short of his usual point and perspicuity. It 
might be true that his memoir was neglected by physiologists because 
it was mathematical, and by parity of reason it might have been neg- 
lected by physicists and mathematicians as being physiological. But 
it is surely no reason to say that it was neglected by physicists because 
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