Chapter IV · THE PROGRESS OF THE INSTITUTION TO THE RESIGNATION OF PROFESSOR YOUNG. 1801 to 1803. WITH THE LIFE OF DR. THOMAS YOUNG. 1773 to 1829. (continued 2)

His first paper on the ‘Theory of Light and Colours’ was read to the Royal Society, November 12, 1801. His second paper on this subject was read July 1, 1802, and his third November 24, 1803. His ‘Syllabus of Lectures at the Royal Institution,’ dated January 19, 1802, p. 116, gives the first printed account of his views. He says, ‘Speaking of Newton’s views, it will be sufficient for our present purpose to enumerate the respective explanations of the principal phenomena of light as they are furnished by the Newtonian system, and by the theory lately submitted to the Royal Society’; and (p. 117) he says, ‘The colours of thin and of thick plates, and the fringes produced by inflection, are referred by Newton to the very complicated effects of an undulating medium on the corpuscles of light, but without any attempt to accommodate the explanations to the measures obtained from his own accurate and elegant experiments; those of striated surfaces he has not noticed. But the general law by which all these appearances are governed may be very easily deduced from the interference of two coincident undulations which either co-operate or destroy each other in the same manner as two musical notes produce an alternate intermission and remission in the beating of an imperfect unison.’

‘The young gentleman of Edinburgh,’ afterwards known as Lord Brougham, in the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ January 1803, criticised the Royal Society papers.

It is difficult [he said] to argue with an author whose mind is filled with a medium of so fickle and vibratory a nature. Were we to take the trouble to refute him, he might tell us, My opinion is changed, and I have abandoned that hypothesis, but here is another for you. We demand if the world of science which Newton once illuminated is to be as changeable in its modes as the world of taste, which is directed by the nod of a silly woman or a pampered fop? Has the Royal Society degraded its publications into bulletins of new and fashionable theories for the ladies who attend the Royal Institution? Proh pudor! Let the Professor continue to amuse his audience with an endless variety of such harmless trifles, but, in the name of science, let them not find admittance into that venerable repository which contains the works of Newton, and Boyle, and Cavendish, and Maskelyne, and Herschel.

Young’s most famous experiment of stopping the rays which passed on one side of a thin card exposed to a sunbeam in a dark chamber Brougham threw aside, with the assertion that the experiment was inaccurately made. Dr. Young replied:

The reviewer has here afforded me an opportunity for a triumph, as gratifying as any triumph can be where an enemy is so contemptible. Conscious of inability to explain the experiment, too ungenerous to confess that inability, and too idle to repeat the experiment, he is compelled to advance the supposition that it was incorrect. ‘Let him make the experiment, and then deny the result if he can.’

He took no special means to make his answer known, and only one copy of his reply was sold. The poison sank deep into the public mind, and Dr. Young’s researches remained comparatively unnoticed until Arago, in 1815, when reporting upon the optical discoveries of Fresnel, showed that a greater discoverer than Newton had anticipated the researches of the French philosopher.

Dr. Young gives the following account of his discovery of the general law of the interference of light:

It was in May 1801 that I discovered, by reflecting on the beautiful experiments of Newton, a law which appears to me to account for a greater variety of interesting phenomena, than any other optical principle that has yet been made known. I shall endeavour to explain this law by a comparison:—Suppose a number of equal waves of water to move upon the surface of a stagnant lake, with a certain constant velocity, and to enter a narrow channel leading out of the lake; suppose, then, another similar cause to have existed, another equal series of waves will arrive at the same channel with the same velocity, and at the same time with the first. Neither series of waves will destroy the other, but their effects will be combined. If they enter the channel in such a manner that the elevations of one series coincide with those of the other, they must together produce a series of greater joint elevations; but if the elevations of one series are so situated as to correspond to the depressions of the other, they must exactly fill up those depressions, and the surface of the water must remain smooth; at least I can discover no alternative either from theory or from experiment.

Now I maintain that similar effects take place whenever two portions of light are thus mixed, and this I call the general law of the interference of light.

Within three months he became Professor at the Royal Institution.

In 1801, on the 6th of July, Count Rumford reported to the managers that, ‘at the recommendation of Sir Joseph Banks, he had had a conversation with Dr. Young respecting his engaging as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution and Editor of the Journals, together with a general superintendency of the house, and it appearing from the report of Count Rumford that Dr. Young is a man of abilities equal to these undertakings, it was resolved that Count Rumford be authorised to engage Dr. Young in the aforesaid capacities at a salary of 300l. per annum.’[23]

On August 3, at the managers’ meeting (Count Rumford in the chair; present, Henry Cavendish, R. J. Sullivan; secretary J. P. Auriol), Count Rumford reported that, agreeably to the authority granted him by the managers, he had engaged Dr. Thomas Young. A copy of his letter to Dr. Young, expressing the conditions of his engagement, was at the same time laid before the committee.

The first number of the Journal had been published by Rumford on April 5, 1800. Dr. Young alone edited the fourth number in the autumn of 1801, the fifth number in December 1801, and, after editing two more numbers alone, he joined with Davy in the editorship till the Journal stopped in 1803.

On January 19 Dr. Young printed, at the press of the Royal Institution, a syllabus of his first course of lectures.

The first part was on Natural Philosophy; the second part on Hydrodynamics; the third part on Physics; and the fourth part on Mathematical Elements.

Each had a Greek or Latin motto prefixed, and the following advertisement to the first part was printed:

In order to adapt the delivery of these lectures as much as possible to the convenience of different persons who may be disposed to attend them, they will be divided into three parts of nearly equal magnitude, and in great measure independent of each other. Two parts will be delivered in succession on Mondays and Wednesdays, at two o’clock, and the third on Friday evenings at eight. And in future winters, each part will be taken in turn for the evening lecture, so that the whole course may be heard at either hour. The fourth part contains all the preliminary knowledge that is necessary for those who may wish to enter mathematically on the various subjects of the lectures; it will save considerable pains in consulting other authors, and the most experienced may often find it convenient for occasional reference. It was the more desirable that something of this kind should be inserted, as mathematical arguments will be avoided as much as possible in the lectures; and for this reason the demonstrations which occur in the syllabus are distinguished from the principal text by a smaller type, and a separate place in the page. In a future edition a fifth part will probably be added, containing a catalogue of the best authors, with references to their works upon each subject. One acknowledgment must, however, be inserted here for the extensive use that has been made of the valuable articles contributed by Professor Robison to the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica.’

Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, January 19, 1802.

The volume forms an octavo of upwards of 250 pages; and it is quite evidence enough that the matter, no less than the manner of the lectures of Dr. Young, were more fitted for Cambridge than for the Royal Institution.

Dr. Paris thus contrasts Davy’s manner with that of Young:

To judge fairly of the influence of a popular style we should acquaint ourselves with the effects of an opposite method, and, if an appeal be made to experience, I may very safely abide the issue. Dr. Young, whose profound knowledge of the subjects he taught no one will venture to question, lectured in the same theatre, and to an audience similarly constituted to that which was attracted by Davy, but he found the number of his attendants diminish daily, and for no other reason than that he adopted too severe and didactic a style.

The first afternoon lecture was given by Dr. Young, on Wednesday, January 20, 1802, and the first evening lecture on Friday, January 22.

At the commencement he gave an introductory view of the nature and objects of the Royal Institution and of the particular plan of the lectures. Afterwards he proceeded to the subject of mechanics with the doctrine of motion.

In the introductory lecture, when dwelling on the objects of the Royal Institution and the dissemination of elementary knowledge, he said:

Those who possess the genuine spirit of scientific investigation, and who have tasted the pure satisfaction arising from an advancement in intellectual acquirements, are content to proceed in their researches without inquiring at every step what they gain by their newly-discovered lights, and to what practical purposes they are applicable; they receive a sufficient gratification from the enlargement of their views of the constitution of the universe, and experience in the immediate pursuit of knowledge that pleasure which others wish to obtain more circuitously by its means. And it is one of the principal advantages of a liberal education that it creates a susceptibility of an enjoyment so elegant and so rational.

On the subject of the education of females at the Royal Institution he said:

The many leisure hours which are at the command of females in the superior orders of society may surely be appropriated with greater satisfaction to the improvement of the mind, and to the acquisition of knowledge, than to such amusements as are only designed for facilitating the insipid consumption of superfluous time.

The Royal Institution may in some degree supply the place of a subordinate university to those whose sex or situation in life has denied them the advantage of an academical education in the national seminaries of learning.

With regard to the special objects of the Institution, the theory of practical mechanics and of manufactures, he said:

We must be more practical than academies of science and more theoretical than societies for the improvement of arts; while we endeavour at the same time to give stability to our proceedings by an annual recurrence to the elementary knowledge which is subservient to the purposes of both and, as far as we are able, apply to practice the newest lights which may from time to time be thrown on particular branches of mechanical science. It is thus that we may most effectually perform what the idolised sophists of antiquity but verbally professed—to bring down philosophy from the heavens and to make her an inhabitant of the earth.

We may venture to affirm that out of every hundred of fancied improvements in arts or in machines ninety at least, if not ninety-nine, are either old or useless; the object of our researches is to enable ourselves to distinguish and to adopt the hundredth. But, while we prune the luxuriant shoots of youthful invention, we must remember to perform our task with leniency, and to show that we wish only to give additional vigour to the healthful branches, and not to extirpate the parent plant.

He spoke of the repository of models as being a supplementary room for apparatus exhibited and described in the lectures, and ‘where a few other articles may perhaps deserve admission.’ He mentioned the library and the Journals as free from commercial shackles, but made no mention of the workshops nor of the education of artisans.

When all the advantages which may reasonably be expected from this Institution shall be fully understood and impartially considered, it is to be hoped that few persons of liberal minds will be indifferent to its success or unwilling to contribute to it and to participate in it.

To that regulation which forbids the introduction of any discussions connected with the learned professions I shall always most willingly submit and most punctually attend. It requires the study of a considerable portion of a man’s life to qualify him to be of use to mankind in any of them, and nothing can be more pernicious to individuals or to society than the attempting to proceed practically upon an imperfect conception of a few first principles only. In physic the wisest can do but little, and the ignorant can only do worse than nothing; and anxiously as we are disposed to seek whatever relief the learned and experienced may be able to afford us, so cautiously ought we to avoid the mischievous interference of the half-studied empiric. In politics and in religion we need but to look back on the history of kingdoms and republics, in order to be aware of the mischiefs which ensue when fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

With regard to his prospectus and lectures he said:

For the sake of those who are not disposed to undertake the labour of following with mathematical accuracy all the steps of the demonstrations on which the doctrines of the mechanical sciences are founded, I shall endeavour to avoid in the whole of this course of lectures every intricacy which might be perplexing to a beginner, and every argument which is fitter for the closet than for a public theatre. Here I propose to support the same propositions by experimental proofs, not that I consider such proofs as the most conclusive, or as more interesting to a truly philosophic mind, than a deduction from general principles, but because there is a satisfaction in discovering the coincidence of theories with visible effects, and because objects of sense are of advantage in assisting the imagination to comprehend, and the memory to retain, what in a more abstracted form might fail to excite sufficient attention. With regard to the mode of delivering these lectures, I shall in general entreat my audience to pardon the formality of a written discourse in favour of the advantage of a superior degree of order and perspicuity. It would unquestionably be desirable that every syllable advanced should be rendered perfectly easy and comprehensible even to the most uninformed, that the most inattentive might find sufficient variety and entertainment in what is submitted to them to excite their curiosity, and that in all cases the pleasing, and sometimes even the surprising, should be united with the instructive and the important. But, whenever there appears to be a real impossibility of reconciling these various objects, I shall esteem it better to seek for substantial utility than temporary amusement; for if we fail of being useful, for want of being sufficiently popular, we remain at least respectable; but if we are unsuccessful in our attempts to amuse, we immediately appear trifling and contemptible. It shall, however, at all times be my endeavour to avoid each extreme, and I trust that I shall then only be condemned when I am found abstruse from ostentation or uninteresting from supineness. The most difficult thing for a teacher is to recollect how much it cost himself to learn, and to accommodate his instruction to the apprehension of the uninformed. By bearing in mind this observation I hope to be able to render my lectures more and more intelligible and familiar, not by passing over difficulties, but by endeavouring to facilitate the task of overcoming them; and if at any time I appear to have failed in this attempt, I shall think myself honoured by any subsequent inquiries that my audience may be disposed to make.

The division of the whole course of lectures into three parts was originally suggested by the periodical succession in which the appointed hours recur, but it appears to be more convenient than any other for the regular classification of the subjects. The general doctrines of motion and their application to all purposes, variable at pleasure, supply the materials of the first two parts, of which the one treats of the motions of solid bodies and the other of those of fluids, including the theory of light. The third part relates to the particular history of the phenomena of nature, and of the affections of bodies actually existing in the universe independently of the art of man, comprehending astronomy, geography, and the doctrine of the properties of matter, and of the most general and powerful agents that influence it.

The synthetical order of proceeding from simple and general principles to their more intimate combinations in particular cases, is by far the most compendious for conveying information with regard to sciences that are at all referable to certain fundamental laws. For these laws being once established, each fact, as soon as it is known, assumes its place in the system, and is retained in the memory by its relation to the rest as a connecting link. In the analytical mode, on the contrary, which is absolutely necessary for the first investigation of truth, we are obliged to begin by collecting a number of insulated circumstances, which lead us back by degrees to the knowledge of original principles, but which, until we arrive at these principles, are merely a burden to the memory. For the phenomena of nature resemble the scattered leaves of the Sibylline prophecies; a word only, or a single syllable, is written on each leaf, which, when separately considered, conveys no instruction to the mind, but when, by the labour of patient investigation, every fragment is replaced in its appropriate connexion, the whole begins at once to speak a perspicuous and a harmonious language.

On July 5 he requested leave of the managers to be absent during the months of August and September, taking care in the meantime to provide sufficient matter for the publication of the Journals. He went with the late Duke of Richmond and his brother to France. At Paris he was introduced to the First Consul at the Institute.

This year he was appointed foreign secretary of the Royal Society, and he held this office for the remainder of his life. He refused the appointment of secretary in 1812, because he thought it would interfere with his medical reputation.

In 1803, on January 26, the lectures at the Institution recommenced. Young and Davy each gave weekly two day lectures and one evening lecture. On Tuesday and Friday the lectures were in the evening.

On February 21 Young proposed his preface[24] to the second volume of the Journal of the Institution.

This year, in March, he took his first Cambridge medical degree; he did not receive his degree as Doctor of Medicine until 1808.

On July 4 the engagement of Dr. Young with the Royal Institution terminated.[25]

On October 3 he was elected a subscriber for life for his services to the Institution.

On November 6 he wrote to the managers:

40 Welbeck Street.

I beg to return you my sincere thanks for the privileges of a life subscriber to the Royal Institution, which you have conferred upon me. I consider this honour both as a flattering mark of your approbation of the unremitting attention which it was my endeavour to pay to the objects of the Institution while I was employed in its service, and as a substantial advantage in giving me access to a collection of books so valuable as that which is now forming in it. For this privilege I cannot show my gratitude better than by endeavouring to make such use of it as to render the publication of my lectures, which I am preparing, more and more worthy of the Institution in which they were delivered, and fitted to co-operate in its exertions for the advancement and dissemination of mechanical knowledge.

After this time Dr. Young took no part in the progress of the Royal Institution. A very short sketch of the remainder of his life, therefore, will be given.

When between thirty-one and forty-one years of age he used his utmost endeavours to succeed in practice in Welbeck Street. In 1804 he married, and he built a house at Worthing, where he practised in the autumn for sixteen years. In 1807 he tried to become physician to the Middlesex Hospital. In this he failed, but he lectured there on Chemistry, Physiology, Nosology, Practice of Medicine, and Materia Medica. Many of the lectures formed afterwards part of his work on ‘Medical Literature.’

This year he published his ‘Course of Lectures at the Royal Institution’ in two quarto volumes. The long delay was occasioned partly from the increase of matter and partly from the difficulty of the engravings. Through the bankruptcy of his publisher, Johnson, he lost the 1,000l. he was to receive for his work. The Dean of Ely says of these volumes: ‘They form altogether the most comprehensive system of natural philosophy and of what the French call physics that has ever been published in this country; equally remarkable for precision and accuracy in the enunciation of the vast multitude of propositions and facts which they contain, for the boldness with which they enter upon the discussion of the most abstruse and difficult subjects, and for the addition or suggestion of new matter or new views in almost every department of philosophy.’

In the autumn of 1810 he wrote to Sir Joseph Banks an account of ‘an agricultural micrometer for measuring the fineness of wool.’ See Appendix II.

On January 24, 1811, he was elected one of the physicians of St. George’s Hospital. The contest, he says, was almost unparalleled. ‘The Cabbells were very naturally confident of triumphant success; parliamentary influence and the natural wish to serve a man who is likely to be Lord Chancellor made Sir S. Romilly’s nephew, Dr. Roget, very formidable.’ ‘Mrs. Young has emerged from death to life by the event of this contest.’ Before and after this time he wrote frequently for the ‘Quarterly Review,’ to which he contributed eighteen articles. Perhaps the most celebrated was on the ‘Herculanean Manuscripts,’ of which eighteen hundred were discovered. ‘It is a consolation to know,’ said a friend, ‘that Brougham, who took advantage of the growing circulation of the ‘Edinburgh Review’ to desseminate his vile abuse of you, and Jeffery, who permitted him to do so, should be condemned to hear your praises on all sides, and to feel that the publication in which they are engaged is suffering, and is likely to suffer, by your means.’

In 1814 he was asked to contribute to the new supplement of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ but he declined, because ‘it was necessary to abstain as much as possible from appearing before the public as an author in any department of science not immediately medical.’

During the next ten years of Dr. Young’s life the failure of his efforts to succeed as a physician led him to the highest literary success that could be attained.

In 1814 he began his ‘Hieroglyphical Researches,’ and throughout the summer and autumn he worked at the Rosetta Stone.

At the end of the year he wrote to Mr. Hudson Gurney, who had got him Champollion’s book—‘Egypt under the Pharaohs:’ ‘I have only spent literally five minutes in looking over Champollion, turning by means of the index to the parts where he has quoted the inscription of Rosetta. He follows Akerblad (a Swedish attaché at Paris, a good classical and first-rate Coptic scholar, who had written a letter on this stone to Silvestre de Sacy) blindly, with scarcely any acknowledgment. But he has certainly picked out the sense of a few passages in the inscription by means of Akerblad’s investigations, although in four or five Coptic words which he pretends to have found in it he is wrong in all but one, and that is a very short and a very obvious one. My translation is printed; it is anonymous, and must for some time remain so, but everybody whose approbation is worth having will know the author.’ In the summer of this year Arago and Gay-Lussac visited him at Worthing. Young then learned what Fresnel was doing on the diffraction of light, and they saw what Young had published in his lectures in 1807.

In 1816 he proposed to the editor of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ to write for him. He says: ‘I would also suggest (in addition to sound) alphabet, annuities, attraction, capillary action, cohesion, colour, dew, Egypt, eye, forms, friction, halo, hieroglyphics, hydraulics, motion, resistance, ship, strength, tides, and waves. Anything of a medical nature which you might think desirable would of course be doubly so to me. Nor should I be difficult with respect to any other subject that might occur to you. L’alti non temo, e l’umili non sdegno.’ He contributed sixty-three articles; forty-six were biographical. This year he published his ‘Translation of the Hieroglyphics’ with a correspondence with De Sacy and Akerblad.

In 1818 he wrote the article ‘Egypt’ for the Encyclopædia. ‘It was pronounced to be the greatest effort of scholarship and ingenuity of which modern literature could boast; yet it was only a popular and superficial sketch of the vast mass of materials which his diligence had collected and his genius had interpreted.’

He was this year appointed superintendent of the ‘Nautical Almanac’ and secretary of the Board of Longitude, which was established to relieve the Astronomer Royal from all scientific questions regarding the interests of navigation. He immediately set himself to correct all the errors of the Almanac that endangered the safety of ships, but, considering it as intended for nautical and not astronomical use, he resisted the changes which practical astronomers strongly urged on him and on the Government.

In 1822 he wrote to Mr. Gurney from Paris:

In my own pursuits I have found abundance of novelty to interest me, both the scientific and literary departments of the Institute happening at this moment to be particularly engaged with my investigations, and a Frenchman having in each of them been engaged in going over my own ground without being fully acquainted with what I had done, and having had to exclaim, ‘Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.’ Fresnel, a young mathematician of the civil engineers, has really been doing some good things in the extension and application of my theory of light, and Champollion, the author of the book you brought over, has been working still harder upon the Egyptian characters. He devotes his whole time to the pursuit, and he has been wonderfully successful in some of the documents which he has obtained.

How far he will acknowledge everything which he has either borrowed or might have borrowed from me, I am not quite confident, but the world will be sure to remark que c’est le premier pas qui coûte, though the proverb is less true in this case than in most others, for here every step is laborious.

The best comparative estimate of the value of the work of Young and Fresnel on light was given by Sir John Herschel, in 1827, at the end of his view of the undulating theory of light in the ‘Encyclopædia Metropolitana’:

Such is the beautiful theory of Fresnel and Young, for we must not, in our regard for one great name, forget the justice which is due to the other; and to separate them, and to assign to each his share, would be as impracticable as invidious, so intimately are they blended together throughout every part of this system—early, acute, and pregnant suggestion characterising the one, and maturity of thought, fulness of systematic development, and decisive experimental illustration equally distinguishing the other.

During the last five years of Dr. Young’s life, when he was between fifty-one and fifty-six years old, he ceased to be a practising physician, and occupied himself with science and literature only.

In 1827, at the anniversary of the Royal Society, after the resignation of the presidency by Sir Humphry Davy, the claims of Dr. Young were too strong to be altogether neglected.

Writing to his sister he says:

I find there has been pretty general conversation about making me President of the Royal Society, and I really think if I were foolish enough to wish for the office, I am at this moment popular enough to obtain it; but you well know that nothing is further from my wishes.

Davies Gilbert was chosen. ‘I told him,’ says Young, ‘that he had not quite enough of the devil in him, that Sir Joseph Banks should have left his eyebrows to go with his cocked hat, if he had left the Society nothing else.’

In the summer of 1828 he visited Paris for the last time on his way to Geneva. He was then one of the eight foreign associates of the Academy. To Mr. Gurney he wrote:

My principal object was Champollion, and with him I have been completely successful as far as I wanted his assistance, for, to say the truth, our conferences have not been very gratifying to my vanity. He has done so much more and so much better than I had any reason to believe he would or could have done, and, as he feels his own importance more, he feels less occasion to be tenacious of any trifling claims which may justly be denied him, and in this spirit he has borne my criticisms with perfect good humour, though Arago has charged me with some degree of undue severity, and wanted to pass the matter over as not having been published as mine; but to this I could not consent: and, supposing that Champollion might have been unacquainted with the remarks, I thought it a matter of conscience to carry them to him this morning, before I allowed him to continue his profuse liberality in furnishing me with more than I want.

From Geneva Young sent Arago, at his request, a statement of his claims. He gave full justice to Champollion. But when Arago, a few years later, read his éloge of Young, he still said that Young’s principle of phonetisation of the hieroglyphics was mixed with error, chiefly by making symbols stand for words and syllables, instead of for letters only. He also denied Young’s knowledge of two or more signs for the same letter.

His health up to this time, with the exception before mentioned, had been perfect. During this summer excursion he was most easily fatigued, and appeared to age rapidly.

In a letter written soon after his return he says:

As for myself, I am perfectly content with the life I lead—walking on business of routine every day from eleven to two, the rest of the day sitting over my hieroglyphics, or my mathematics, and conversing in my library with people beyond the Alps or the Mediterranean. I have lost all ambition for a more bustling life, or more active scenes, and I believe I am as happy as a person so old in soul is capable of being. In mental faculties I am not yet old, and I amuse myself almost daily with some petty bonnes fortunes among some of the nine sisters. I hear nothing whatever from the Admiralty, and so much the better, except receiving 300l. a year instead of four. As for Croker, I never believe a word of his going out, and he may remain in for aught I care, and be Lord Melville’s master if he chooses; for the stronger of two heads will generally direct the weaker in the long run. I am deep in the value of life, and I really begin to think that people do live longer than was formerly supposed, though not in the extravagant degree that was asserted.

In 1828, at the Royal Society, when the President, Davies Gilbert, announced Wollaston’s donation of 2,000l. for the promotion of scientific research and his own gift of 1,000l., Young, as senior officer, returned thanks for the Society. He tells Mr. Gurney, ‘I summoned up courage to take the first opportunity of muttering out, “Mr. President, a gentleman on my right says he never heard me make a speech.”’

In January 1829 he wrote:

Our new Committee of Longitude is settled, at least for the present, though the radical abuse of the ‘Nautical Almanac’ is likely to continue; but, fortunately for my security, they have put the Admiralty and the ‘Nautical Almanac’ together; so they may do their worst. Croker has appointed Sabine and Faraday and me to constitute a scientific committee to advise the Admiralty, which was all that the Board of Longitude would do, and it is better that things should be called by their right names.

Immediately a memorial was sent to the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, against the ‘Nautical Almanac.’ A report on this paper was made by Dr. Young in February.

Though his health was at this time rapidly declining, his observations were written with his usual precision and ability, giving way in one instance only to feelings of personal resentment, if a stronger term may not be used, which had been provoked by attacks of unusual violence and bitterness. It is hardly necessary to add that he adhered substantially to the views which he had previously maintained. His death, which took place on May 10, put an end to the contest.

The life of Dr. Young began, continued, and ended strangely. Throughout he was a phenomenon. His course was very different from what might have been expected and quite opposed to that which would have been most suited to him.

He was the great physicist of his time, and yet ‘at no period of his life was he fond of repeating experiments or even of originating new ones. He considered that, however necessary to the advancement of science, they demanded a great sacrifice of time; and that, when a fact was once established, that time was better employed in considering the purposes to which it might be applied or the principles which it might tend to elucidate.’ He was kind by nature and a Quaker by education, and yet he was always at war for his discoveries. He never was free from a scientific or literary controversy. As a professor at the Royal Institution, as a hospital physician at St. George’s, and still more as a practitioner of medicine in London and Worthing, his powers were entirely misdirected. With a culture like that of Newton what noble fruit might not Young have brought forth! The work he did for science was undervalued during his life; nevertheless he was content; and nothing shows that he foresaw or wished for that great reputation which has gradually gathered round his name. Two years before his death, writing to his sister-in-law regarding the praise which Herschel had given him in his ‘Treatise on Light,’ he said:

I think he has divided the prize very fairly, and I dare say poor Fresnel, if he had lived, would have preferred his share of the honour as much as I do mine. It was before I knew you that mine was earned, and acute suggestion was then—and indeed always—more in the line of my ambition than experimental illustration. But surely one that is conscious that such things may be said with some truth (or who imagines it) has no further temptation to be President of the Royal Society even if he could.

His character was drawn by Sir Humphry Davy thus: ‘A man of universal erudition and almost universal accomplishments. Had he limited himself to any one department of knowledge he must have been first in that department. But as a mathematician, a scholar, and hieroglyphist he was eminent; and he knew so much that it is difficult to say what he did not know. He was a most amiable and good-tempered man; too fond, perhaps, of the society of persons of rank for a true philosopher.’

Mr. Davies Gilbert, the President of the Royal Society, in his speech from the chair on the death of Young, said:

He came into the world with a confidence in his own talents, growing out of an expectation of excellence entertained in common by all his friends, which expectation was more than realised in the progress of his future life. The multiplied objects which he pursued were carried to such an extent, that each might have been supposed to have exclusively occupied the full powers of his mind; knowledge in the abstract, the most enlarged generalisations, and the most minute and intricate details were equally effected by him; but he had most pleasure in that which appeared to be most difficult of investigation. The example is only to be followed by those of equal perseverance.