THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN PHYSICS 



been able to read fluently. Before his fourth birthday 

 came he had read the Bible twice through, as well as 

 Watts's Hymns poor child ! and when seven or eight 

 he had shown a propensity to absorb languages much 

 as other children absorb nursery tattle and Mother 

 Goose rhymes. When he was fourteen, a young lady 

 visiting the household of his tutor patronized the pretty 

 boy by asking to see a specimen of his penmanship. 

 The pretty boy complied readily enough, and mildly re- 

 buked his interrogator by rapidly writing some sen- 

 tences for her in fourteen languages, including such as 

 Arabian, Persian, and Ethiopic. 



Meantime languages had been but an incident in the 

 education of the lad. He seems to have entered every 

 available field of thought mathematics, physics, bot- 

 any, literature, music, painting, languages, philosophy, 

 archaeology, and so on to tiresome lengths and once he 

 had entered any field he seldom turned aside until he 

 had reached the confines of the subject as then known, 

 and added something new from the recesses of his own 

 genius. He was as versatile as Priestley, as profound 

 as Newton himself. He had the range of a mere dilet- 

 tante, but everywhere the full grasp of the master. He 

 took early for his motto the saying that what one man 

 has done, another man may do. Granting that the 

 other man has the brain of a Thomas Young, it is a true 

 motto. 



Such then was the young Quaker who came to London 

 to follow out the humdrum life of a practitioner of medi- 

 cine in the year 1801. But incidentally the young pl^si- 

 cian was prevailed upon to occupy the interims of early 

 practice by fulfilling the duties of the chair of Natural Phi- 

 losophy at the Royal Institution, which Count Rumford 

 H 193 



