Though his health was at this time rapidly declining, his observations were written with his usual precision and ability, giving way in one instance only to feelings of personal resentment, if a stronger term may not be used, which had been provoked by attacks of unusual violence and bitterness. It is hardly necessary to add that he adhered substantially to the views which he had previously maintained. His death, which took place on May 10, put an end to the contest. The life of Dr. Young began, continued, and ended strangely. Throughout he was a phenomenon. His course was very different from what might have been expected and quite opposed to that which would have been most suited to him. He was the great physicist of his time, and yet ‘at no period of his life was he fond of repeating experiments or even of originating new ones. He considered that, however necessary to the advancement of science, they demanded a great sacrifice of time; and that, when a fact was once established, that time was better employed in considering the purposes to which it might be applied or the principles which it might tend to elucidate.’ He was kind by nature and a Quaker by education, and yet he was always at war for his discoveries. He never was free from a scientific or literary controversy. As a professor at the Royal Institution, as a hospital physician at St. George’s, and still more as a practitioner of medicine in London and Worthing, his powers were entirely misdirected. With a culture like that of Newton what noble fruit might not Young have brought forth! The work he did for science was undervalued during his life; nevertheless he was content; and nothing shows that he foresaw or wished for that great reputation which has gradually gathered round his name. Two years before his death, writing to his sister-in-law regarding the praise which Herschel had given him in his ‘Treatise on Light,’ he said: I think he has divided the prize very fairly, and I dare say poor Fresnel, if he had lived, would have preferred his share of the honour as much as I do mine. It was _before I knew you_ that mine was earned, and acute suggestion was then--and indeed always--more in the line of my ambition than experimental illustration. But surely one that is conscious that such things may be said with some truth (or who imagines it) has no further temptation to be President of the Royal Society even if he could. His character was drawn by Sir Humphry Davy thus: ‘A man of universal erudition and almost universal accomplishments. Had he limited himself to any one department of knowledge he must have been first in that department. But as a mathematician, a scholar, and hieroglyphist he was eminent; and he knew so much that it is difficult to say what he did not know. He was a most amiable and good-tempered man; too fond, perhaps, of the society of persons of rank for a true philosopher.’