ABSTRACT
Thomas Young is said to have been able to read fluently at the age of two, and before he was twenty years old he had studied French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldee, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Ethiopic, to say nothing of Philosophy, Botany, and Entomology. It is of course quite possible that he modified parts of his translations as he became more and more familiar with the characters; indeed, this could hardly be avoided, seeing that he spent so much time in working out hieroglyphic, enchorial, and Coptic texts. Accordingly, Mr. Bankes proceeded to confront the supposed name of Ptolemy, as furnished to him from the Rosetta Stone by Dr. Young, with the hieroglyphical designation over the male figure, and found an exact agreement. In 1814 Dr. Young began his study of the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone; and in 1818 he was appointed Secretary of the Board of Longitude.
