438 Life of Count Rumford. 



have been the great man of England. He should have 

 given himself entirely to science. What an unfortunate 

 man he was in the number and size of his disputes ! 

 Whatever he touched led to a fight. And yet he v^as a 

 gentleman and a Quaker by birth." 



Dr. Young speaks in high terms of the character of 

 Rumford's Experiments on Heat.* ^ As Corresponding 

 Secretary of the Royal Society, it was Young's official 

 duty to transmit to Malus and Fresnel the Rumford 

 Medals, as awarded to them. Writing to the latter in 

 1827, he accompanies the medals, and a draft for 

 55 i6s. y the accumulated surplus income of the fund, 

 with a letter containing these sentences : " At last, 

 then, I trust you will no longer have to complain of 

 the neglect which your experiments have for a time 

 undergone in this country. I should also claim some 

 right to participate in the compliment w r hich is tacitly 

 paid to myself in common with you by this adjudica- 

 tion, but, considering that more than a quarter of a 

 century is past since my principal experiments were 

 made, I can only feel it a sort of anticipation &f posthu- 

 mous fame, which I have never particularly coveted. "f 



It would seem to be only through the strange chances 

 by which allotments of honor and glory are dropped or 

 withheld, that Young himself should never have re- 

 ceived the Rumford prize. 



The sharp and sweeping assertion of Dean Peacock, 

 that Rumford "abandoned the scheme of the Institu- 

 tion altogether," is not sustained by facts. The friends 

 and coadjutors whom he had drawn in to his design, 

 and who undertook with him its early management and 



* Miscellaneous Works, edited by Dean Peacock. Vol. I. pp. 83, 1 68. 

 f Miscellaneous Works, Vol. I. p. 409. 



