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.
522/608 page 510
![I send you a draught of two small birds ; the bigger called a chipper, or hetulce carptor; cropping the first sproutings of the birch trees, and comes early in the spring. The other a very small bird, less than the certhya, or eye-creeper, called a whm-bird. I send you the draught of a fish taken sometimes in our seas. Pray compare it with draco minor Johnstoni, This draught M'as taken from the fish dried, and so the prickly fins less discernable. There is a very small kind of smelt; but in shape and smell like the other, taken in good plenty about Lynn, and called prims. Though scombri or mackerell be a common fish, yet our seas afford sometimes, strange large ones, as I have heard from fishermen and others; and this year, 1668, one was taken at Leostoffe, an ell long by measure, and presented to a gentleman, a friend of mine. Musca tuliparum moscliata is a small bee-like fly, of an excel- lent fragrant odour, which I have often found at the bottom of the flowers of tulips. In the little box I send a piece of vesicaria or seminaria marina cut off from a good full one, found on the sea-shore. We have also an ejectment of the sea, very common, which is funago, whereof some very large. I thank you for communicating the account of thunder and lightning; some strange effects thereof I have found here; but this last year we had Uttle or no thunder or lightning. 2>r. Browne to Dr. Merritt.^—Norwich, Febr. 6, [1668-9.] HoNOUKED Sir,—I am sorry I have had diversions of such necessity, as to hinder my more sudden salute since I received your last. I thank you for the sight of the spermaceti, and such kind of effects from lightning and thunder I have known, and about four yeares ago about this towne, when I with many others saw fire-balls fly, and go off when they met with resistance, and one carried away the tiles and boards of a leucomb window of my own howse, being higher than the neighbour howses, and breaking agaynst it with a report hke a good canon. I set down that occurrence in this citty and country, and have it somewhere amongst my papers, and fragments of a woeman's hat that was shiver'd into pieces of the bignesse of a groat. I have stUl by me too, a litle of the spermaceti of our whale, as also the oyle and balsam which I made with the oyle and sper- ' Published (erroneously) as a letter to Mr. Dugdale.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22650337_0001_0524.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
