Volume 1

The works of Sir Thomas Browne : including his unpublished correspondence, and a memoir / edited by Simon Wilkin.

  • Thomas Browne
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The works of Sir Thomas Browne : including his unpublished correspondence, and a memoir / edited by Simon Wilkin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    ago into French. It might now be proper, had not the favour with which it was at first received filled the kingdom with copies, to reprint it with notes partly supplemental and partly emendatory, to subjoin those discoveries which the industrv of the last a°:e has made, and correct those mistakes which the author has committed, not by idleness or negligence, but for want of Boyle's and Newton's philosophy.6 He appears, indeed, to have been willing to pay labour for truth.7 Having heard a flying rumour of sympathetick needles, by which, suspended over a cir- cular alphabet, distant friends or lovers might corre- spond, he procured two such alphabets to be made, touched his needles with the same magnet, and placed them upon proper spindles : the result was, that when he moved one of his needles, the other, instead of taking by sympathy the same direction, stood like the pillars of Hercules. That it continued motion- less, will be easily believed; and most men would have been content to believe it, without the labour of so hopeless an experiment. Browne might himself have obtained the same conviction by a method less operose, if he had thrust his needles through corks, and then set them afloat in two basons of water. Notwithstanding his zeal to detect old errors, he seems not very easy to admit new positions; for he never mentions the motion of the earth but with 6 This hook, Sec.'] See Preface to ments depended. By this disappoinl- Pseudodoxia Epidemica, for a detailed ac- merit, (which I submitted to repeated count of the replies to it, as well as of delays, in the vain hope of avoiding,) I the various editions and translations of have been deprived of some important the work itself. If the present edition scientific illustrations, precisely of the be deemed but imperfectly to answer the character described in the paragraph bc- doctor's description of what it ought to fore us be, I can only offer the plea, that ar- ' truth.] His willingness to take pains rangements (on whose efficiency I was to disprove even the most absurd fables, is justified in relying) have been, in a great well evinced in his chapter On the Three measure, frustrated, by the nonfulfilment Kings of Collein, vol. iii, p. 317. of engagements, on which those arrange-