CHRISTIAN

This article appears in Volume V28, Page 940 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: CHR-CLI

CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION
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 181r 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 loth of May 1829.

Young

is perhaps best known for his

work

WORK

in physical optics, as the author of a remarkable

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

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

CHANGE (derived through the Fr. from the Late Lat. cambium, cambiare, to barter; the ultimate derivation is probably from the root which appears in the Gr. «a urmu', to bend)

of the curvature of the crystalline lens; in 18o1 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 r8o8 on the " Functions of the Heart and Arteries," and his medical writings included An Introduction to Medical Literature, including a System of

Practical

PRACTICAL

Nosology

NOSOLOGY (Gr. v5a-or, disease, and X yor, science)

(1813) and A

Practical

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

INSCRIPTIONS (from Lat. inscribere, to write upon)

; by 1814 he had completely translated the enchorial (demotic) text of the

Rosetta

ROSETTA (Coptic Rashit, Arabic Rashid)

stone, and a few years Iater 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

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 Encyclopaedia Britannica.
His works were collected, with a Life by G. Peacock, in 1855.

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