Thomas Young was the son of Thomas and Sarah Young, and the eldest of ten children. His mother was a niece of the well-known physician, Dr. Richard Brocklesby, and both his father and mother were members of the Society of Friends, in whose principles all their children were very carefully trained. It was to the independence of character thus developed that Dr. Young attributed very much of the success which he afterwards attained. He was born at Milverton, in Somersetshire, on June 13, 1773. For the greater part of the first seven years of his life he lived with his maternal grandfather, Mr. Robert Davis, at Minehead, in Somersetshire. According to his own account, he could read with considerable fluency at the age of _two_, and, under the instructions of his aunt and a village schoolmistress, he had "read the Bible twice through, and also Watts's Hymns," before he attained the age of four. It may with reason be thought that both the schoolmistress and the aunt should have been severely reprimanded, and it is certain that their example is not to be commended; but Young's infantile constitution seems to have been proof against over-pressure, and before he was five years old he could recite the whole of Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," with scarcely a mistake. He commenced learning Latin before he was six, under the guidance of a Nonconformist minister, who also taught him to write. When not quite seven years of age he went to boarding-school, where he remained a year and a half; but he appears to have learned more by independent effort than under the guidance of his master, for privately he "had mastered the last rules of Walkinghame's 'Tutor's Assistant'" before reaching the middle of the book under the master's inspection. After leaving this school, he lived at home for six months, but frequently visited a neighbour who was a land surveyor, and at whose house he amused himself with philosophical instruments and scientific books, especially a "Dictionary of Arts and Sciences." When nearly nine he went to the school of Mr. Thompson, at Compton, in Dorsetshire, where he remained nearly four years, and read several Greek and Latin authors, as well as the elements of natural philosophy--the latter in books lent him by Mr. Jeffrey, the assistant-master. This Mr. Jeffrey appears to have been something of a mechanical genius, and he gave Young lessons in turning, drawing, bookbinding, and the grinding and preparation of colours. Before leaving this school, at the age of thirteen, Young had read six chapters of the Hebrew Bible.