these experiments appeared evidently to be INEXHAUSTIBLE.

"It is hardly necessary to add that anything which any INSULATED body,
or system of bodies, can continue to furnish WITHOUT LIMITATION cannot
possibly be a MATERIAL substance; and it appears to me to be extremely
difficult, if not quite impossible, to form any distinct idea of
anything capable of being excited and communicated, in the manner
the heat was excited and communicated in these experiments, except in
MOTION."(1)

THOMAS YOUNG AND THE WAVE THEORY OF LIGHT

But contemporary judgment, while it listened respectfully to Rumford,
was little minded to accept his verdict. The cherished beliefs of a
generation are not to be put down with a single blow. Where many minds
have a similar drift, however, the first blow may precipitate a
general conflict; and so it was here. Young Humphry Davy had duplicated
Rumford's experiments, and reached similar conclusions; and soon others
fell into line. Then, in 1800, Dr. Thomas Young--"Phenomenon Young" they
called him at Cambridge, because he was reputed to know everything--took
up the cudgels for the vibratory theory of light, and it began to be
clear that the two "imponderables," heat and light, must stand or
fall together; but no one as yet made a claim against the fluidity of
electricity.

Before we take up the details of the assault made by Young upon the
old doctrine of the materiality of light, we must pause to consider the
personality of Young himself. For it chanced that this Quaker physician
was one of those prodigies who come but few times in a century, and
the full list of whom in the records of history could be told on one's
thumbs and fingers. His biographers tell us things about him that read
like the most patent fairy-tales. As a mere infant in arms he had been
able to read fluently. Before his fourth birthday came he had read the
Bible twice through, as well as Watts's Hymns--poor child!--and when
seven or eight he had shown a propensity to absorb languages much as
other children absorb nursery tattle and Mother Goose rhymes. When
he was fourteen, a young lady visiting the household of his tutor
patronized the pretty boy by asking to see a specimen of his penmanship.
The pretty boy complied readily enough, and mildly rebuked his
interrogator by rapidly writing some sentences for her in fourteen
languages, including such as, Arabian, Persian, and Ethiopic.

Meantime languages had been but an incident