Thomas Young

Abstract

IT is a welcome feature of the times that interest in the great pioneers who created the science of mathematical physics in Great Britain shows signs of revival. The recent publication of a biographical sketch of Thomas Young by Mr. Frank Oldham is an indication. At the time of his decease (1829) at the age of fifty-six years, the task of collecting and editing Young's later scientific writings passed into the hands of George Peacock, Dean of Ely and Lowndean professor at Cambridge: and though through pressure of business at Cambridge and Ely he took twenty years over the work, the result in two volumes on physical science, with a third on hieroglyphical research, and the indispensable standard biography as a fourth, is, or ought to be, in a proper scheme of things, one of the permanent classics of natural knowledge. It reveals the editor, known as one of the introducers of the formal Continental analysis into Cambridge, as an adept critic in general Natural Philosophy of the Newtonian type as well.