The autumn of 1796 Young spent in travelling in Germany; in the following February he returned to England, and was admitted a fellow-commoner of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. It is said that the Master, in introducing Young to the Tutors and other Fellows, said, "I have brought you a pupil qualified to read lectures to his tutors." Young's opinion of Cambridge, as compared with German universities, was favourable to the former; but as he had complained of the want of hospitality at Goettingen, so in Cambridge he complained of the want of social intercourse between the senior members of the university and persons _in statu pupillari_. At that time there was no system of medical education in the university, and the statutes required that six years should elapse between the admission of a medical student and his taking the degree of M.B. Young appears to have attracted comparatively little attention as an undergraduate in college. He did not care to associate with other undergraduates, and had little opportunity of intercourse with the senior members of the university. He was still keeping terms at Cambridge when his uncle, Dr. Brocklesby, died. To Young he left the house in Norfolk Street, Park Lane, with the furniture, books, pictures, and prints, and about L10,000. In the summer of 1798 a slight accident at Cambridge compelled Young to keep to his rooms, and being thus forcibly deprived of his usual round of social intercourse, he returned to his favourite studies in physics. The most important result of this study was the establishment of the principle of interference in sound, which afforded the explanation of the phenomenon of "beats" in music, and which afterwards led up to the discovery of the interference of light--a discovery which Sir John Herschel characterized as "the key to all the more abstruse and puzzling properties of light, and which would alone have sufficed to place its author in the highest rank of scientific immortality, even were his other almost innumerable claims to such a distinction disregarded."