He was a favorite student of Professor John Playfair who was, at that time, becoming the great promoter of James Hutton's uniformitarian geology.
Young could read and write Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, and Italian with some acquaintance with Arabic, Chaldean and Syriac,[3] and he developed his own shorthand, which is still undecipherable.
Young wrote twenty-two books on many topics: inter alia, the history of Whitby; the great solar eclipse of 1836; an acclaimed biography of Captain James Cook; the downfall of Napoleon; and, a catalog of hardy garden plants.
With John Bird as artist he wrote A Geological Survey of the Yorkshire Coast in 1822 published in Whitby.
[4] He promoted fossil collecting saying, "The researches of the geologist are far from being unworthy of the Christian, or the philosopher: for, while they enlarge the bounds of our knowledge, and present a wide field for intellectual employment and innocent pleasure, they may serve to conduct us to the glorious Being.