384 THOMAS YOUNG. 
or at Worthing, where he passed the sea-bathing season, 
any extended practice. The public found him, in fact, 
too scientific. We must also avow that his public lec- 
tures on medicine, those, for instance, which he deliv- 
ered at St. George’s Hospital, were generally but ill- 
attended. It has been said, to explain this, that his 
lectures were too dry, too full of matter, and that they 
were beyond the apprehension of ordinary understandings. 
But might not the want of success be rather ascribed to 
the freedom, not very common, with which Young 
pointed out the inextrieable difficulties which encounter 
us at every step in the study of the numerous disorders 
of our frail machine ? 
Would any one expect at Paris, and especially in an 
age when every one seeks to attain his end quickly and 
without labour, that a professor of the faculty would 
retain many auditors if he were to commence with these 
words, which I borrow literally from Dr. Young :— 
“No study is so complicated as that of medicine ; it 
exceeds the limits of human intelligence. Those physi- 
cians who precipitately go on without trying to compre- 
hend what they observe, are often just as much advanced 
as those who give themselves up to generalizations 
hastily made on observations in regard to which all 
analogy is at fault.” And if the Professor, continuing 
in the same style, should add, “In the lottery of medi- 
cine the chances of the possessor of ten tickets must 
evidently be greater than those of the possessor of five,” 
—when they believed themselves engaged in a lottery, 
would those of his auditors whom the first phrase had 
not driven away, be at all disposed to make any great 
efforts to procure for themselves more tickets, or, to 
explain the meaning of our Professor—the greatest 
amount of knowledge possible ? 
