Towards the close of the year 1828, Wollaston became dangerously ill with disease of the brain. Feeling his end approaching, and being unable to write himself, he employed an amanuensis to write accounts of such of his discoveries and inventions as he was unwilling should perish with him; and in this manner some of his most important papers were communicated to the Royal Society. It is a curious fact, that, in spite of the extensive cerebral disease under which he laboured, his faculties continued unclouded to the very last. When almost at the point of death, one of his friends having observed, loud enough for him to hear, that he was unconscious of what was passing around him, Wollaston made a sign for pencil and paper, and then wrote down some figures, and after casting up the sum, returned the paper: the amount was found to be correct.
Dr. Wollaston died on the 22nd of December, 1828, at the age of sixty-two—only a few months before his great scientific contemporaries, Sir Humphry Davy and Dr. Thomas Young. He was buried in Chiselhurst churchyard, Kent. Dr. William Henry[48] gives the following summary of his character:—
"Dr. Wollaston was endowed with bodily senses of extraordinary acuteness and accuracy, and with great general vigour of understanding. Trained in the discipline of the exact sciences, he had acquired a powerful command over his attention, and had habituated himself to the most rigid correctness both of thought and language. He was sufficiently provided with the resources of the mathematics, to be enabled to pursue with success profound enquiries in mechanical and optical philosophy, the results of which enabled him to unfold the causes of phenomena not before understood, and to enrich the arts connected with those sciences by the invention of ingenious and valuable instruments. In chemistry he was distinguished by the extreme nicety and delicacy of his observations, by the quickness and precision with which he marked resemblances and discriminated differences, the sagacity with which he devised experiments and anticipated their results, and the skill with which he executed the analysis of fragments of new substances, often so minute as to be scarcely perceptible by ordinary eyes. He was remarkable, too, for the caution with which he advanced from facts to general conclusions; a caution which, if it sometimes prevented him from reaching at once the most sublime truths, yet rendered every step of his ascent a secure station, from which it was easy to rise to higher and more enlarged inductions."—Weld's History of the Royal Society, with Memoirs of the Presidents. London, 1848.—Sketches of the Royal Society, &c., by Sir John Barrow, Bart., F.R.S. London, 1849.
THOMAS YOUNG, M.D., F.R.S., &c.
MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE.
Born June 13, 1773. Died May 10, 1829.
Dr. Thomas Young, celebrated for his universal attainments, was born at Milverton, in Somersetshire. He was the eldest of ten children of Thomas and Sarah Young; his mother was a niece of Dr. Richard Brocklesby, a physician of considerable eminence in London. Both of his parents were members of the Society of Friends, and to the tenets of that sect, which recognizes the immediate influence of a Supreme Intelligence as a guide in the ordinary conduct of life, Dr. Young was accustomed in after years to attribute, in no slight degree, the formation of those determined habits of perseverance which gave him the power of effecting any object upon which he was engaged, and by which he was enabled to work out his own education almost from infancy, and with little comparative assistance from others. At the age of two years Young could read with considerable fluency, and before he was four years old had read the Bible through twice, and also Watts' hymns. He was likewise from his earliest years in the habit of committing to memory pieces of poetry, in proof of which there exists a memorandum, written by Young's grandfather, on the margin of a copy of Goldsmith's 'Deserted Village,' to the effect that his grandson Thomas had repeated to him the whole poem, with the exception of a word or two, before he was five years old. In 1780 he was placed at a boarding-school at Stapleton, near Bristol, and here the deficiency of the instructor appears to have advanced the studies of the pupil, as Young now became his own teacher, and used to study by himself the last pages of the book taught almost before he had reached the middle under the eye of the master.
In the year 1782 he became an inmate of the school kept by Mr. Thompson, at Crompton, in Dorsetshire, remaining there nearly four years, during which period he rapidly acquired knowledge upon various subjects. Having commenced the study of botany, he was led to attempt the construction of a microscope, with the assistance of an usher in the school of the name of Benjamin Martin, in order to examine the plants he was in the habit of gathering. In his endeavours to make the microscope Young found it necessary to procure a lathe, and for a time everything gave way to a passion for turning. This was, however, at length succeeded by a desire to become acquainted with the nature of fluxions, and after reading through and mastering a treatise upon this subject, he turned his attention to the study of Hebrew and other Oriental languages. Ultimately at the age of fourteen Thomas Young was more or less versed in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Hebrew, Persic, and Arabic, and in forming the characters of these languages had already acquired a considerable portion of that beauty and accuracy of penmanship which was afterwards so remarkable in his copies of Greek compositions, as well as those subjects connected with the literature of ancient Egypt. A story is related of him, that when requested a few years later, by a friend of Dr. Brocklesby, who presumed somewhat upon Young's youthful appearance, to exhibit a specimen of his penmanship, he replied by writing a sentence in his best style in fourteen different languages.