170 Chapter 11
resemble, in scope and structure, his concurrent comparative work on languages, as if they
were various possible “ temperaments ” of living speech.
Only four months later (April 1800), Young published “ An Essay on Music, ” giving
important evidence of his ongoing interest in music during the height of his optical
researches. He begins by acknowledging “ the agreeable effect of melodious sounds, not
only on the human ear, but on the feelings and on the passions, ” yet Young considers
music far more than “ delicate titillation ” or even than “ giving expression to poetical and
impassioned diction, ” which Coleridge and other Romantic thinkers emphasized. Contra
Kant, Young argues that the study of music is not “ amusement only ” but reveals a
science “ that, in its whole extent, it is scarcely less intricate or more easily acquired
than the most profound of the more regular occupations of the schools. ” Those who
show “ superior brilliancy ” in music “ seem almost to require the faculties of a superior
order of beings. ” Young ’ s essay shows considerable familiarity with the history and
theory of music, as well as the importance he ascribed to it. He emphasizes the role of
harmonics or overtones for the common triads and scales of contemporary musical
practice. Finally, he discusses the terminology of musical tempo and gives a detailed
table of the number of measures per minute sounded by composers such as Handel,
Haydn, and Mozart. This table shows acquaintance with J. J. Quantz ’ s attempt several
decades earlier to standardize tempo using as a standard the common resting pulse rate
of eighty beats per minute. As a physician, Young well knew the variability of human
pulse and chose instead a more objective standard given by the number of measures per
minute taken at various tempi. His table gives valuable evidence of performance prac-
tices around 1800.^28
Seven months later (November 1800), Young presented his paper “ On the Mechanism
of the Eye ” to the Royal Society.^29 Revisiting his maiden discovery about the accommoda-
tion of the eye, Young argued that he had been fundamentally right that changes in the
shape of the lens were responsible for accommodation; only after his lifetime was the
mechanism identified with the ciliary muscles surrounding the lens, rather than (as Young
had initially thought) muscular fibers inside the lens itself. But in 1800, Young established
conclusively that the lens alone was responsible for accommodation, not the cornea or the
length of the eyeball, as had been suggested by others.
Young ’ s argument is a tour de force of persistent experimentation and deduction that
refutes the suspicion that he was an inspired dilettante who merely guessed discoveries
without ever exhaustively demonstrating them. His experiments required not only ingenu-
ity but courage, for he experimented on himself, following an old medical tradition and
also Newton ’ s more disturbing example. Newton had inserted a bodkin (a thin knife)
behind his own eyeball to demonstrate that visual perception could be caused by ocular
pressure without any incoming light.^30 Young, in his turn, performed no less invasive tests
of his own eye and its functioning by fashioning a compass whose ends were keys that he
pressed against his sclera, the whites of his own eye ( figure 11.4 ).