In 1816 he proposed to the editor of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ to write for him. He says: ‘I would also suggest (in addition to sound) alphabet, annuities, attraction, capillary action, cohesion, colour, dew, Egypt, eye, forms, friction, halo, hieroglyphics, hydraulics, motion, resistance, ship, strength, tides, and waves. Anything of a medical nature which you might think desirable would of course be doubly so to me. Nor should I be difficult with respect to any other subject that might occur to you. L’alti non temo, e l’umili non sdegno.’ He contributed sixty-three articles; forty-six were biographical. This year he published his ‘Translation of the Hieroglyphics’ with a correspondence with De Sacy and Akerblad. In 1818 he wrote the article ‘Egypt’ for the Encyclopædia. ‘It was pronounced to be the greatest effort of scholarship and ingenuity of which modern literature could boast; yet it was only a popular and superficial sketch of the vast mass of materials which his diligence had collected and his genius had interpreted.’ He was this year appointed superintendent of the ‘Nautical Almanac’ and secretary of the Board of Longitude, which was established to relieve the Astronomer Royal from all scientific questions regarding the interests of navigation. He immediately set himself to correct all the errors of the Almanac that endangered the safety of ships, but, considering it as intended for nautical and not astronomical use, he resisted the changes which practical astronomers strongly urged on him and on the Government. In 1822 he wrote to Mr. Gurney from Paris: In my own pursuits I have found abundance of novelty to interest me, both the scientific and literary departments of the Institute happening at this moment to be particularly engaged with my investigations, and a Frenchman having in each of them been engaged in going over my own ground without being fully acquainted with what I had done, and having had to exclaim, ‘Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.’ Fresnel, a young mathematician of the civil engineers, has really been doing some good things in the extension and application of my theory of light, and Champollion, the author of the book you brought over, has been working still harder upon the Egyptian characters. He devotes his whole time to the pursuit, and he has been wonderfully successful in some of the documents which he has obtained. How far he will acknowledge everything which he has either borrowed or might have borrowed from me, I am not quite confident, but the world will be sure to remark que c’est le premier pas qui coûte, though the proverb is less true in this case than in most others, for here every step is laborious. The best comparative estimate of the value of the work of Young and Fresnel on light was given by Sir John Herschel, in 1827, at the end of his view of the undulating theory of light in the ‘Encyclopædia Metropolitana’: