croscopes, telescopes, and electrical machines, and the use of the lathe. In an autobiographical sketch, he says that, after returning home from this school, he devoted himself almost entirely to the study of Hebrew, and to the practice of turning and telescope-making. He borrowed and studied with great diligence the Chaldee, Syriac, Samaritan, and Persian grammars, and, having got hold of the Lord's Prayer in a hundred different languages, was greatly interested. At fourteen years of age Young became tutor to Mr. Hudson Gurney, who was a year and a half older, and who continued his friend through life, and wrote a biography of him. He wrote a beautiful hand, and, when once requested by a friend of his uncle, Dr. Brocklesby, an eminent London physician, to exhibit a specimen of his handwriting, he wrote a sentence in fourteen different languages. His precocity reminds us of that of J. S. Mill, but it had a far more spontaneous and varied exercise. He went on with his mathematical, botanical, and entomological studies with great ardor, but he was left to entire freedom in their pursuit, and believed that "whoever would arrive at excellence must be self-taught;" and that there was "in reality very little that a person, seriously and industriously disposed to improve, may not obtain from books with more advantage than from the living instructor." Upon this principle, as his biographer remarks, he was self-taught. "He read nothing hastily or cursorily, and his memory was so tenacious that he never forgot what he had once mastered. He wrote exercises and composed in the languages in which he studied. His journals were written in Latin, and his criticisms on French authors in French, and on Italian authors in Italian. His mathematical studies were carried on in a similar manner. He began the six books of Euclid on such a day, and finished them on another; and we hear no more of them. Algebra, trigonometry, and fluxions were dispatched in the same way. He read the 'Principia' deliberately through; and it appears from the remarks in his journals that he had fully comprehended them."
At nineteen years of age, in obedience to the wishes of his uncle, Mr. Young entered upon the study of anatomy and medicine, and from the outset he became an original investigator in this field, his first researches being into the structure of the eye as an optical instrument. At the age of twenty-one, the Duke of Richmond offered him the appointment of his private secretary, at $1,000 a year, and "a place at the duke's table." This he declined on the ground of Quaker scruples, and wrote to his mother that he "was not ashamed to allege his regard for the Society as a principal reason for not accepting the proposal.... This event in his life led him, no doubt, to consider how far his position as a Quaker might interfere with his future prospects. He had hitherto adopted their garb and phraseology, but he now began to divest himself of these characteristics, and to mix largely with society. In Edinburgh, where he went at the close of 1794 to prosecute his medical education, he did not scruple to violate the principles of his
