"There were giants abroad in the world of science in the early days of our century, Herschel, Lagrange, and Laplace; Cuvier, Brongniart, and Lamarck; Humboldt, Goethe, Priestley—what need to extend the list?—the names crowd upon us. But among them all there was no taller intellectual figure than that of a young Quaker who came to settle in London and practise the profession of medicine in the year 1801. The name of this young aspirant to medical honors and emoluments was Thomas Young. He came fresh from professional studies at Edinburgh and on the Continent, and he had the theory of medicine at his tongue's end; yet his medical knowledge, compared with the mental treasures of his capacious intellect as a whole, was but as a drop of water in the ocean. Incidentally the young physician was prevailed upon to occupy... the chair of Natural Philosophy at the , which Count Rumford had founded, and of which Davy was then Professor of Chemistry—the institution whose glories have been perpetuated by such names as Faraday and Tyndall, and which the Briton of to-day speaks of as the "Pantheon of Science.""