"Thou say'st not only skill is gained,
But genius too may be obtained,
By studious imitation."
In the autumn of 1792 Young went to London for the purpose of studying medicine. He lived in lodgings in Westminster, and attended the Hunterian School of Anatomy. A year afterwards he entered St. Bartholomew's Hospital as a medical student. The notes which he took of the lectures were written sometimes in Latin, interspersed with Greek quotations, and not unfrequently with mathematical calculations, which may be assumed to have been made before the lecture commenced. During his school days he had paid some attention to geometrical optics, and had constructed a microscope and telescope. Now his attention was attracted to a far more delicate instrument—the eye itself. Young had learned how a telescope can be "focussed" so as to give clear images of objects more or less distant. Some such power of adjustment must be possessed by the eye, or it could never form distinct images of objects, whether at a distance of a foot or a mile. The apparently fibrous structure of the crystalline lens of the eye had been noticed and described by Leuwenhoeck; and Pemberton, a century before Young took up the subject, had suggested that the fibres were muscles, by the action of which the eye was "accommodated" for near or distant vision. In dissecting the eye of an ox Young thought he had discovered evidence confirmatory of this view, and the paper which he wrote on the subject was not only published in the "Philosophical Transactions," but secured his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in June, 1794. This paper was important, not simply because it led to Young's election to the Royal Society, but mainly because it was his first published paper on optical subjects. Later on he showed incontestably, by exact measurements, that it is the crystalline lens which changes its form during adjustment; but he was wrong in supposing the fibres of the lens to be muscular. By carefully measuring the distance between the images of two candles formed by reflection from the cornea, he showed that the cornea experienced no change of form. His eyes were very prominent; and turning them so as to look very obliquely, he measured the length of the eye from back to front with a pair of compasses whose points were protected, pressing one point against the cornea, and the other between the back of the eye and the orbit, and showed that, when the eye was focussed for different distances, there was no change in the length of the axis. The crystalline lens was the only resource left whereby the accommodation could be effected. The accommodation is, in fact, brought about by the action of the ciliary muscle. The natural form of the lens is more convex than is consistent with distinct vision, except for very near objects. The tension of the suspensory ligament, which is attached to the front of the lens all round its edge, renders the anterior surface of the lens much less curved than it would naturally be. The ciliary muscle is a ring of muscular fibre attached to the ciliary process close to the circumference of the suspensory ligament. By its contraction it forms a smaller ring, and, diminishing the external diameter, it releases the tension of the suspensory ligament, thus allowing the crystalline lens to bulge out and adapt itself for the diverging rays coming from near objects. It is the exertion of contracting the ciliary muscle that constitutes the effort of which we are conscious when looking at very near objects. It was not, however, till long after the time of Dr. Young that this complicated action was fully made out, though the change of form of the anterior surface of the crystalline lens was discovered by the change in the image of a bright object formed by reflection.
In the spring of 1794 Young took a holiday tour in Cornwall, with Hudson Gurney, visiting on his way the Duke of Richmond, who was drinking the waters at Bath, under the advice of Dr. Brocklesby. In Cornwall, the mining machinery attracted his attention very much more than the natural beauties of the country. Towards the end of the summer he visited the Duke of Richmond at Goodwood, when the duke offered him the appointment of private secretary. He resolved, however, to continue his medical course, one of the reasons which he alleged being his regard for the Society of Friends, whose principles he considered inconsistent with the appointment of Private Secretary to the Master-General of the Ordnance.
The following winter he spent as a medical student at Edinburgh. Here he gave up the costume of the Society of Friends, and in many ways departed from their rules of conduct. He mingled freely with the university, attended the theatre, took lessons in dancing and playing the flute, and generally cultivated the habits of what is technically known as "society." Throughout this change in his life he retained his high moral principles as a guide of conduct, and appears to have acted from a firm conviction of what was right. At the same time, it must be admitted that the breaking down of barriers, however conventional they may be, is an operation attended in most cases by not a little danger. With Young, the progress of his scientific education may have been delayed on account of the new demands on his time; but besides the study of German, Spanish, and Italian, he appears to have read a considerable amount of general literature during his winter session in Edinburgh. The following summer he took a tour on horseback through the Highlands, taking with him his flute, drawing materials, spirits for preserving insects, boards for drying plants, paper and twine for packing up minerals, and a thermometer; but the geological hammer does not then appear to have been regarded as an essential to the equipment of a philosopher. At Aberdeen he stayed for three days, and reported thus on the university:—
Some of the professors are capable of raising a university to celebrity, especially Copeland and Ogilvie; but the division and proximity of the two universities (King's College and Marischal College) is not favourable to the advancement of learning; besides, the lectures are all, or mostly, given at the same hour, and the same professor continues to instruct a class for four years in the different branches. Were the colleges united, and the internal regulations of the system new modelled, the cheapness of the place, the number of small bursaries for poor or distinguished students, and the merit of the instructors, might make this university a very respectable seminary in some branches of science. The fee to a professor for a five-months' session is only a guinea and a half. I was delighted with the inspection of the rich store of mathematical and philosophical apparatus belonging to Professor Copeland of Marischal College, made in his own house, and partly with his own hands, finished with no less care than elegance; and tending to illustrate every branch of physics in the course of his lectures, which must be equally entertaining and instructive.
Before leaving the Highlands, Young visited Gordon Castle, where he stayed two days; and appears to have distinguished himself by the powers of endurance he exhibited in dancing reels. On leaving he writes: "I could almost have wished to break or dislocate a limb by chance, that I might be detained against my will; I do not recollect that I have ever passed my time more agreeably, or with a party that I thought more congenial to my own dispositions: and what would hardly be credited by many grave reasoners on life and manners, that a person who had spent the whole of his earlier years a recluse from the gay world, and a total stranger to all that was passing in the higher ranks of society, should feel himself more at home and more at ease in the most magnificent palace in the country than in the humblest dwelling with those whose birth was most similar to his own. Without enlarging on the duke's good sense and sincerity, the duchess's spirit and powers of conversation, Lady Madeline's liveliness and affability, Louisa's beauty and sweetness, Georgiana's naïveté and quickness of parts, young Sandy's good nature, I may say that I was truly sorry to part with every one of them."
Young seems not to have known at this time that it is an essential feature of true gentlefolk to dissipate all sense of constraint or uneasiness from those with whom they are brought into contact and that in this they can be readily distinguished from those who have wealth without breeding. The Duchess of Gordon gave Young an introduction to the Duke of Argyll, so, while travelling through the Western Highlands, he paid a visit to Inverary Castle, and "galloped over" the country with the duke's daughters. Speaking of these ladies, he says, "Lady Charlotte ... is to Lady Augusta what Venus is to Minerva; I suppose she wishes for no more. Both are goddesses."
On his return to the West of England, he visited the Coalbrook Dale Iron Works, when Mr. Reynolds told him "that before the war he had agreed with a man to make a flute a hundred and fifty feet long, and two and a half in diameter, to be blown by a steam-engine and played on by barrels."
On the 7th of the following October Young left London, and after spending six days on the voyage from Yarmouth to Hamburg, he reached Göttingen on the 27th of the same month; two days afterwards he matriculated, and on November 3 he commenced his studies as a member of the university. He continued to take lessons in drawing, dancing, riding, and music, and commenced learning the clavichord. The English students at Göttingen, in order to advance their German conversation, arranged to pay a fine whenever they spoke in English in one another's company. On Sundays it was usual for the professors to give entertainments to the students, though they seldom invited them to dinner or supper. "Indeed, they could not well afford, out of a fee of a louis or two, to give large entertainments; but the absence of the hospitality which prevails rather more in Britain, is compensated by the light in which the students are regarded; they are not the less, but perhaps the more, respected for being students, and indeed, they behave in general like gentlemen, much more so than in some other German universities."
At Göttingen Young attended, in addition to his medical lectures, Spithler's lectures on the History and Constitution of the European States, Heyne on the History of the Ancient Arts, and Lichtenberg's course on Physics. Speaking of Blumenbach's lectures on Natural History, Young says, "He showed us yesterday a laborious treatise, with elegant plates, published in the beginning of this century at Wurzburg, which is a most singular specimen of credulity in affairs of natural history. Dr. Behringen used to torment the young men of a large school by obliging them to go out with him collecting petrifactions; and the young rogues, in revenge, spent a whole winter in counterfeiting specimens, which they buried in a hill which the good man meant to explore, and imposed them upon him for most wonderful lusus naturæ. It is interesting in a metaphysical point of view to observe how the mind attempts to accommodate itself; in one case, where the boys had made the figure of a plant thick and clumsy, the doctor remarks the difference, and says that Nature seems to have restored to the plant in thickness that which she had taken away from its other dimensions."