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: