"7. All the phenomena of the colors of thin plates, which are in reality unintelligible on the common hypothesis, admit of a very complete and simple explanation by this supposition. The analogy which is here superficially indicated will probably soon be made public more in detail; and will also be extended to the colors of thick plates, and to the fringes produced by inflection, affording from Newton's own elaborate experiments a most convincing argument in favor of this system."
Regarding medicine as an inductive branch of philosophy, Dr. Young drew up an "Introduction to Medical Literature, including a Practical System of Nosology," which Dr. Peacock, his latest biographer, says, bears much the same relation to the medical sciences that his lectures on natural philosophy bear to the mathematical and physical sciences. It appeared in 1813, and in an Appendix he gave a sketch of animal chemistry, translated from the Swedish of Berzelius by the aid of a grammar and dictionary, without any previous acquaintance with the language.
In the field of philological exploration, Dr. Young exhibited talents of a very high order. He was especially skillful in deciphering manuscripts and inscriptions which had baffled the ingenuity of his predecessors. "The attention of Dr. Young was first devoted to hieroglyphic research by a papyrus in Egyptian characters, submitted to him in the spring of 1814, by Sir W. Rouse Boughton, found in a mummy-case in a catacomb near Thebes. The papyrus was written in cursive Egyptian characters, and Dr. Young's notice of it was appended to a communication, by its discoverer, to the Antiquarian Society. Between May and November of the same year, he analyzed the three inscriptions of the well-known Rosetta Stone, and gave a conjectural translation of the second of the three, which was added to the notice above mentioned." Champollion, the great French antiquarian, was the rival of Young in the work of unraveling the old inscriptions, and a warm controversy grew out of their respective claims which was not free from the tinge of national feeling. Both were men undoubtedly of great originality, and made their discoveries independent of each other. "Dr. Young never failed to do justice to the sagacity, the extensive learning, and the deep research of Champollion; and his own merits were nobly recognized by the countrymen of his rival, when, in 1828, they elected him one of the eight foreign associates of the Institute of France."
About the year 1810 Dr. Young took up the subject of naval architecture, and contributed important improvements to the construction of ships-of-war. In 1816 he was appointed secretary to a commission for ascertaining the length of the second's pendulum, and drew up the three reports which were made in 1819, 1820, and 1821. In 1818 he was appointed superintendent of the Nautical Almanac. He had, some years previously to this, gone into the subject of life-assurance, and worked out mathematically the formula of the value of life, and
