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pluna. This duty occupied a week; and then, having been relieved by the Spaniards, it marched to join the main army in the passes of the Pyrenees, where it was actively engaged in the battles of the 28th and 30th of July. In a promotion of officers which took place soon after, Brigadier-General Madden was promoted to the rank of Marechal de Campo, or Major-General in the Portuguese service; but a brevet promotion which took place at the same date among the British officers, had the effect of raising above him many who had previously acknowledged his precedence in rank; and this led to such disagreements and inconveniencies, that he was two months after desired to relinquish his command to the next senior officer, and to proceed to Lisbon. There he remained until the peace, when he returned home in the Rodney, with Vice-Admiral Sir George Martin, in June, 1814.

Sir Geo. Madden obtained a general officer's gold medal for his Pyrenean actions, and was nominated a Companion of the Bath. He received the royal permission to wear the insignia of a Knight Commander of the Portuguese Military Order of the Tower and Sword, April 4. 1816; and was knighted on the 5th of July in the same year. He was raised to the brevet rank of Major-General in 1819.

Sir George Madden's death occurred at Portsmouth, on the 26th of November, 1828.

The foregoing memoir has been abridged from the "Royal Military Calendar."

No. XXIX.

THOMAS YOUNG, M.D. F.R. S. AND F. L. S.

SENIOR PHYSICIAN TO ST. GEORGE'S HOSPITAL.

THIS distinguished scholar and philosopher was a nephew of the late celebrated Dr. Brocklesby, through whose care he received an excellent education, partly at Gottingen, and partly at Edinburgh. Having taken his degrees, with great credit, at the latter place, he came to London, and was some time a Lecturer at the Royal Institution. He was subsequently appointed Physician to St. George's Hospital. In 1794 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, of which he was in 1804 appointed Foreign Secretary.

Dr. Young was, in many respects, a rarely-gifted and extraordinary man. With a mind so happily constituted as to be equally fitted for engaging in any pursuit, or mastering any given branch of human knowledge, he united a degree of perseverance admirably adapted to give full effect to this versatility, and an innate sagacity which enabled him at once to perceive the full extent of every difficulty that impeded his progress, and to overcome it. Hence it was his fortune, or, we should rather say, his distinguishing merit, to attain to nearly equal eminence both in science and in letters. Among geometers and natural philosophers, he was unquestionably, if not the first, at least in the very first class; while his great knowledge of the practical application of science to the useful arts, and the business of life, rendered his assistance indispensable to the government whenever it was necessary to obtain accurate information respecting the conduct and management of scientific establishments, proposed improvements in

the arts of life, or those particular subjects of legislation which can be regulated only upon scientific principles. In such enquiries and investigations a very considerable portion of his time was latterly occupied; but we may safely refer to the works on science which he has left behind him, and in particular to his Treatise on Optics, and his Lectures on Natural Philosophy, together with a multitude of papers in the Transactions of the Royal Society, as affording ample evidence of the great proficiency to which he had attained both in the pure and in the mixed mathematics. Nor was he less remarkable for his acquirements as a scholar, than for his attainments as a man of science. The friend, and sometimes the com> panion of Porson, (of whose life, character, and scholarship, he has given a most masterly sketch in the Supplement to the last edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica,") it may easily be supposed that he was not unacquainted with the language and literature of ancient Greece; and, in point of fact, with the exception of Dr. Parr and one or two others, his illustrious friend left behind him no Grecian superior to Dr. Young. He had read every thing, and he remembered every thing. Nothing which had at any time interested him, and to which he had given his mind, ever escaped from his memory: all his knowledge, indeed, seems to have been written, or rather engraved, as it were, upon a tablet of brass, in indelible characters, which he could read off whenever occasion or necessity required. We do not by any means intend to say that Dr. Young was a man of refined or even of correct taste. On the contrary, he was a sort of practical utilitarian, who invariably neglected the husk or shell in order to get at the kernel, and who never concerned himself about grace, or elegance, or ornament, in his search after truth, or in his attempts to lay up a store of knowledge. The subject-matter of a work alone occupied his attention; and to this he went in the most direct and straight-forward manner possible, without regard to the dress in which it was clothed, or the embellishments with which it was bespangled. Accordingly, he had a much more intimate and thorough acquaintance with the contents of the

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works of the ancients, and had taken a much more exact measure of the amount of knowledge they possessed respecting different subjects, than perhaps any other man of his day; a circumstance which is clearly evinced in the various papers on questions connected with archæology, with which he enriched the pages of sundry publications, and most especially in the article on "Egypt," which he contributed to the Supplement to the "Encyclopædia Britannica ;" and which we do not scruple to pronounce as altogether the most extraordinary effort of scholarship that modern times can boast.

It was in that celebrated article, which has been read and studied in every part of the civilised world, that he first (in the year 1819) exhibited a digest of those discoveries in Egyptian literature, which have immortalised his name, and added a newly-explored region to the vast dominions of knowledge. And, in truth, none can know how much he achieved, except those who have informed themselves how little was done before him. In the multitude of vain attempts which, in the course of nearly two thousand years, had been made to decipher the inscriptions which cover the monuments, or are contained on the papyri found in the mummies, of the ancient Egyptians, extravagance had succeeded extravagance, and absurdity had followed absurdity, until the subject had at length been abandoned as utterly hopeless and untractable. Men of sense had long been disgusted with the cabalistical ravings of Kircher, the wild vagaries of Pluche, and the burlesque fancies of Palin, who discovered the Psalms of David on monuments as old as the reign of Sesostris; and in the confusion produced by these conflicting follies, it was rashly concluded that, because none had as yet succeeded in finding a true solution, the problem was insoluble. The accidental discovery of the tripartite inscription of Rosetta, indeed, revived the hopes of the learned; and it was expected that, with the aid of the accompanying Greek translation, the key which had been so long sought for might at last be found. But even this hope began at length to fade away; for although the most exact copies of the inscription were taken and circu

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lad all over Europe, ten long years elapsed without the least progress being made towards deciphering it, notwithstanding some of the first scholars of the age had tortured their ingenuity in repeated attempts to penetrate the mystery. At length, in 1814, Dr. Young gave his mind to the subject, and availing himself of some hints thrown out by De Sacy and Akerblad hints which, had they known how to pursue them, might have enabled those ingenious persons to anticipate the discovery he soon succeeded in reading the whole of the demotic or enchorial part of the inscription, and immediately published his translation in the Museum Criticum of Cambridge. And having achieved this, the most difficult part of his task, the remainder was easy; for the process or method he had employed in reading off the enchorial was, from its very nature, equally applicable to the hieroglyphical branch of the inscription, which he accordingly deciphered and published. The results thus obtained were exceedingly curious; for it was proved beyond the possibility of a doubt, that the proper names in this inscription were spelt alphabetically; that from these an alphabet might be formed: that in the demotic as well as in the hieroglyphic branch, particular groups of characters represented particular words; that these groups were susceptible of decomposition; and that the system of writing used among the ancient Egyptians, was not simple and uniform, but complex and composite, or, in other words, made up of characters some of which were used symbolically, others mimetically, and a third class upon an arbitrary principle, which it was then found impossible to explain. The monument of Philæ, the antigraphs of Mr. Grey, and a variety of other antiquities which were brought to this country, enabled Dr. Young to test the accuracy of his discovery, as well as to modify some of the conclusions at which he had previously arrived; and the result of all his investigations was embodied in the celebrated article on Egypt above-mentioned.

We have no wish to enter into the controversy which subsequently arose between Dr. Young and M. Champollion, on account of the latter laying claim to priority of discovery.

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