Night Thoughts was illustrated by William Blake in 1797, and by
Thomas Stothard in 1799. The Poetical Works of the Rev. Edward
Young . . . were revised by himself (or publication, and a completed
edition appeared in 1778. The Complete Works, Poetry and
Prose, of the Rev. Edward Young . . ., with a life by John Doran,
appeared in 1854. His Poetical Works are included in the Aldine
Edition of the British Poets, with a life by J. Mitford (1830–1836, 1857
and 1866). Sir Herbert Croft wrote the life included in Johnson's
Lives of the Poets, but the critical remarks are by Johnson. For
Young's influence on foreign literature see Joseph Texte, Jean
Jacques Rousseau, A Study of the Literary Relations between France
and England during the Eighteenth Century (Eng. trans., 1889), pp.
304–14; and J. Barnstoff, Young’s Nachtgedanken und ihr Einfluss
auf die deutsche Litteratur (1895). See also W. Thomas, Le Poète
Edward Young (Paris, 1901), who gives an exhaustive study of
Young’s life and work.
YOUNG, JAMES (1811–1883), Scottish industrial chemist, was born in Glasgow on the 13th of July 1811. During his apprenticeship to his father, a carpenter, he attended evening classes at Anderson's College, where he had Lyon Playfair and David Livingstone for fellow-pupils; and the ability he showed was such that Thomas Graham, the professor of chemistry, chose him as lecture assistant in 1832. About 1839, on the recommendation of Graham, whom in 1837 he had accompanied to University College, London, he was appointed chemist at James Muspratt's alkali works in Lancashire; in connexion with alkali he showed that cast-iron vessels could be satisfactorily substituted for silver in the manufacture of caustic soda, and worked out improvements in the production of chlorate of potash. But his name is best known in connexion with the establishment of the Scottish mineral-oil industry. In 1847 Lyon Playfair informed him of a spring of petroleum which had made its appearance at Ridding's Colliery at Alfreton in Derbyshire, and in the following year he began to utilize it for making both burning and lubricating oils. This spring was practically exhausted by 1851. It had served to draw Young's attention to the question of oil-production, and in 1850 he took out his fundamental patent for the distillation of bituminous substances. This was soon put into operation in Scotland, first with the Boghead coal or Torbanehill mineral, and later with bituminous shales, and though he had to face much litigation Young successfully employed it in the manufacture of naphtha and lubricating oils, and subsequently of illuminating oils and paraffin wax, until in 1866, after the patent had expired, he transferred his works to a limited company. In 1872 he suggested the use of caustic lime to prevent the corrosion of iron ships by the bilge water, which he noticed was acid, and in 1878 he began a determination of the velocity of white and coloured light by a modification of H. L. Fizeau's method, in collaboration with Professor George Forbes (b. 1849), at Pitlochry. The final results were obtained in 1880–81 across the Firth of Clyde from Kelly, his house at Wemyss Bay, and a hill above Inellan, and gave values rather higher than those obtained by M. A. Cornu and A. A. Michelson. Young was a liberal supporter of David Livingstone, and also gave £10,500 to endow a chair of technical chemistry at Anderson's College. He died at Wemyss Bay on the 14th of May 1883.
YOUNG, THOMAS (1773–1829), English man of science, belonged to a Quaker family of Milverton, Somerset, where he was born on the 13th of June 1773, the youngest of ten children. At the age of fourteen he was acquainted with Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Hebrew, Persian and Arabic. Beginning to study medicine in London in 1792, he removed to Edinburgh in 1794, and a year later went to Göttingen, where he obtained the degree of doctor of physic in 1796. In 1797 he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In the same year the death of his grand-uncle, Richard Brocklesby, made him financially independent, and in 1799 he established himself as a physician in Welbeck Street, London. Appointed in 1801 professor of physics at the Royal Institution, in two years he delivered ninety-one lectures. These lectures, printed in 1807 (Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy), contain a remarkable number of anticipations of later theories. He resigned his professorship in 1803, fearing that its duties would interfere with his medical practice. In the previous year he was appointed foreign secretary of the Royal Society, of which he had been elected a fellow in 1794. In 1811 he became physician to St George's Hospital, and in 1814 he served on a committee appointed to consider the dangers involved by the general introduction of gas into London. In 1816 he was secretary of a commission charged with ascertaining the length of the seconds pendulum, and in 1818 he became secretary to the Board of Longitude and superintendent of the Nautical Almanac. A few years before his death he became interested in life assurance, and in 1827 he was chosen one of the eight foreign associates of the French Academy of Sciences. He died in London on the 10th of May 1829.
Young is perhaps best known for his work in physical optics, as the author of a remarkable series of researches which did much to establish the undulatory theory of light, and as the discoverer of the interference of light (see Interference). He has also been called the founder of physiological optics. In 1793 he explained the mode in which the eye accommodates itself to vision at different distances as depending on change of the curvature of the crystalline lens; in 1801 he described the defect known as astigmatism; and in his Lectures he put forward the hypothesis, afterwards developed by H. von Helmholtz, that colour perception depends on the presence in the retina of three kinds of nerve fibres which respond respectively to red, green and violet light. In physiology he made an important contribution to haemadynamics in the Croonian lecture for 1808 on the “Functions of the Heart and Arteries,” and his medical writings included An Introduction to Medical Literature, including a System of Practical Nosology (1813) and A Practical and Historical Treatise on Consumptive Diseases (1815).
In another field of research, he was one of the first successful workers at the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions; by 1814 he had completely translated the enchorial (demotic) text of the Rosetta stone, and a few years later had made considerable progress towards an understanding of the hieroglyphic alphabet (see Egypt, § Language and Writing). In 1823 he published an Account of the Recent Discoveries in Hieroglyphic Literature and Egyptian Antiquities. Some of his conclusions appeared in the famous article of Egypt which in 1818 he wrote for the Encyclopædia Britannica.
His works were collected, with a Life by G. Peacock, in 1855.
YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION,[1] an organization for social and religious work among young men, founded in England by Sir George Williams (1821–1905), a merchant of London. Williams's organization grew out of meetings he held for prayer and Bible-reading among his fellow-workers in a dry goods business in the city of London, and was founded in 1844; on the occasion of its jubilee its originator was knighted. Similar associations, indeed, had been in existence in Scotland at a much earlier date. In 1824 David Naismith, who also founded city missions in London and Glasgow, started the Glasgow Young Men's Society for Religious Improvement, a movement which spread to various parts of the United Kingdom, France and America: later the name was changed to the Glasgow Young Men's Christian Association. The object of such associations is to provide in large towns a rendezvous for young men who are compelled to live in lodgings or in the apartments provided by the great business houses. An associate of the Y.M.C.A. must not only be of good moral character, but must also express his adherence to the objects and principles of the association. To be a member means a definite acceptance of the doctrines of the Evangelical Christian faith. In 1910 there were about 400 associations in England, Ireland and Wales, and 226 in Scotland—besides various soldiers' and other auxiliaries. The total membership was about 146,000. Some of the buildings, notably in the Midlands and the north of England, are very fine. The London Association, which from 1880 until shortly before its demolition in 1908 used Exeter Hall, Strand, has erected a
- ↑ Commonly abbreviated Y.M.C.A.
