"Though Dr. Young was not disposed to give his assent to the results of an extremely difficult analysis,—which few persons of his age could venture to follow, and which might appear to those who could not trace them through the long train of consequences... to be either paradoxical or contradictory to the first principles of mechanics—he was sufficiently prepared to seize the general purport of other parts of this comprehensive theory; and by divesting it of the unnecessary generalizations by which it was encumbered, not only to bring its principles to bear immediately upon the ordinary phenomena of the tides, but to apply it to cases which it was otherwise incompetent to reach. Such were the tides of narrow seas and rivers, and the modifications which those tides undergo from the effects of the resistance of the particles of water upon each other, or upon the channels through which they are propagated. The same questions have been made the principal subject of the investigations of the Astronomer Royal, in his Article on Tides and Waves, in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, where they have been treated with that rare combination of mathematical skill and clearness and completeness of exposition for which all his writings are so remarkable. It will be found, however, that there are not many of his results which Young had not already attained, though in a much less definite form, by methods which are, it is true, much less regular and systematic, but which are not less distinguished for the sagacity and philosophical power which they display."