Volume 1
The works of Sir Thomas Browne / edited by Simon Wilkin.
- Thomas Browne
- Date:
- 1890-1893
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The works of Sir Thomas Browne / edited by Simon Wilkin. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.
521/608 page 509
![166S.] MISCELIANEOTJS COHEESPONnr.NCE. : COD I send you also a little elegant sea-plant, which I piilled from a ^eater bush thereof, which I have, resembling the backbone of a fash. Fucus viarinus vertehratus pisciculi spinum referensi ichthi/orac/iius ; or what you think fit. And though perhaps it be not worth the taking notice of formicce arenarite mariyicB, or at least muscus formicarius marinus : yet I observe great numbers by the sea-shore, and at Yarmouth, an open sandy coast, in a sunny day, many large and winged ones, may be observed upon, and rising out of the wet sandsj when the tide falls away. . Notonecton, an insect that swimmeth on its back, and men- tioned by Muffetus, may be observed with us. I send you a white reed-chock by name. Some kind offunco, or little sort thereof. I have had another very white when fresh. Also the draught of a sea-fowl, called a sheerwater, billed like a cormorant, fiery, and snapping like it upon any touch* I kept twenty of them alive five weeks, cramming them with fish, refusing of themselves to feed on anything ; and wearied with cramming them, they lived seventeen days without food. They often fly about fishing ships when the}' clean their fish, and throw away the offal. So that it may be referred to the lari, as larus niger gutture alhido rostro adunco. Gossander.— Videtur esse piuphini species. Worthy sir, that which we call a gossander, and is no rare fowl among us, is a large well-coloured and marked diving fowl, most answering the merganser. It may be like the puffin in fatness and rank- ness ; but no fowl is, I think, like the puffin, differenced from all others by a peculiar kind of bill. Burganders, not so rare as Turn* makes them, common in Norfolk, so abounding in vast and spacious warrens. If you have not yet put in larus minor, or stern,' it would not be omitted, so common about broad waters and plashes not far from the sea. Have you a yarwhelp, barker, or latrator, a marshbird about the bigness of a godwitt? Have you dentalia, which are small univalve testacea, whereof sometimes we find some on the sea-shore ? Have you put in nerites, another little testaceum, which we have P Have you an apiaster, a small bird called a bee-bird P Have you morinellus marinus, or the sea dotterell, better coloured than the other, and somewhat less P * This name is very illegible in the original. * Probably gtei-na hinimdo and minuta. See Sir Thomas's t aper On the Birds, &c. of Norfolk.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22650337_0001_0523.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
