Notes and Letters on the Natural History of Norfolk. Sir Thomas Browne

and it never entered into his mind to submit it to the test of reason. In the "Religio Medici" he declares his devoted adherence first to the guidance of Scripture, and secondly to the Articles of the Church, "whatsoever is beyond, as points indifferent, I observe according to the rules of my private reason;" and again, "where the Scripture is silent, the Church is my text; where that speaks 'tis but my comment; where there is a joint silence of both I borrow not the rules of my religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates of my own reason." This implicit adherence to the literal text of Scripture led to his—shall I say active belief in, or passive acceptance of, the existence of Witchcraft, and thus to the only act in an otherwise blameless life which we must regard with regret and astonishment. I refer to the consenting part he took in the doing to death of two poor women at Bury St. Edmund's in the year 1664. It is my business to act as Browne's exponent, not as his apologist, but it must be borne in mind that in his day the "higher criticism" was a thing unheard of, and that the literal sense of the English translation of the Bible was accepted as binding not only by him but by the vast majority of the people, including the most learned men of the time. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" was a plain command, and given a witch the believer's duty was also plain; that there had been witches there was ample scriptural evidence, but there was none that the days of witchcraft had passed away. Browne only shared this belief with his pious friend, the venerable Bishop Hall, and many men equally devout according to their lights; he makes no secret of the fact and acts in accordance with his convictions and the plain authority of Scripture. Thus it came about that these conscientious but mistaken men were induced to render possible, if not actually to countenance, the fiendish cruelties perpetrated by their unscrupulous allies. In matters which he considered less authoritative his views were so liberal as to gain for him the stigma of infidel or heretic; but let a man govern his thoughts and actions by the private rules Browne laid down for his own guidance (vol. iv., p. 420), and it would be hard to regard him as otherwise than a God-fearing man, striving to live up to his profession.

Aristotle, whose works on Natural History have descended to us in a very imperfect condition, lived in 385–322 B.C., and it was not till A.D. 79 that the Historia Naturalis of Pliny the Elder the next great work, which has survived till our days, was completed, and by some of those most competent to form a judgment the additions which he made were not in all cases improvements. Other writers followed, but their productions were of little value, and it was not till the year 1544 that William Turner published at Cologne what Professor Newton describes as "the first commentary on the birds mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny conceived in anything like the spirit that moves modern Naturalists." Turner's book is very rare and unfortunately at present beyond the reach of most modern students. No attempt at systematic arrangement, as now understood, was made until the Histoire de la Nature des Oyseaux of Pierre Belon (Bellonius) appeared at Paris in 1555, for the much greater work of Conrad Gesner, being the third book of his Historia Animalium, which was published at Zurich in the same year, and treated of Birds, followed, more or less closely, an alphabetical plan which brought upon him the censure of Aldrovandus, three of whose sixteen folio volumes forming the Historia Naturalium bore the title of Ornithologiæ hoc est de Avibus Historiæ, Libri XII., and were brought out at Bologna between the years 1599 and 1603. The Historia Naturalis of John Jonston, or "Jonstonus" (1603–1675), originally published in four sections between the years 1649 and 1653, ran through several editions, and was a popular book in the seventeenth century; it is frequently referred to by Browne, but is a work of very little originality. Though all these authors undoubtedly influenced their successors, it may be fairly said that it was Browne's contemporaries and fellow-countrymen, Francis Willughby and John Ray, who laid the first solid foundation of systematic zoology in their Ornithologia and Historia Piscium, published in 1676 and 1686 respectively; but dying in 1682, Browne was indebted to neither of them, though he doubtless exercised much influence over them, and he had to use the clumsy descriptive terminology then in vogue.[C] Let me illustrate this by a single example. In one of his letters to Merrett he names a "little elegant sea plant" (probably Halecium halecinum, a species of Hydroid Zoophyte), "Fucus marinus vertebratus pisciculi spinum referens ichthyorachius, or what you think fit." On another occasion Merrett thus expresses his approval of Browne's efforts in this direction: "You have very well named the rutilus and expressed fully the cours to bee taken in the imposition of names, viz: the most obvious and most peculiar difference to the ey or any other sens." We can hardly conceive the difficulties these pioneers of Natural Science had to contend with; the works of their predecessors were so indefinite as to be of little value in determining species; they had to depend upon the vague descriptions of fowlers and others; the same bird would probably be known in half a dozen different localities by as many different names, and since no satisfactory mode of preserving specimens had then been discovered, examples for comparison were not available. If inextricable confusion arose with regard to such a bird as the Osprey, well might Browne write with regard to those less readily characterized, "I confess for such little birds I am much unsatisfied on the names given to many by countrymen, and uncertaine what to give them myself, or to what classis of authors cleerly to reduce them. Surely there are many found among us which are not described; and therefore such which you cannot well reduce, may (if at all) be set down after the exacter nomination of small birds as yet of uncertain class of knowledge."

[C] In 1735 appeared the first edition of the Systema Naturæ of Linnæus which, meagre as it was, ushered in a more definite system of classification, whilst his invention of the binomial method of nomenclature, first used by him in the tenth edition of that work published in 1758, contributed not a little in reducing to order what had hitherto been a chaos, although in his classification of birds he for the most part followed his predecessor Ray.

      I must ask pardon for this digression, but my object has been to show the difficulties Browne had to contend with and to emphasise the originality which pervades all his observations, a characteristic so conspicuously absent in the work of most of his predecessors. I should like also to call attention to his references to the migratory habits of many species of birds, a phenomenon attracting little notice in his day, but one which can be so readily observed on the coast of Norfolk. These remarks were penned at a time when hibernation in a state of torpidity was thoroughly believed in—an idea of which even Gilbert White a hundred years later could not thoroughly divest himself. In his tract on "Hawks and Falconry," Browne further says: "How far the hawks, merlins, and wild-fowl which come unto us with a north-west [east?] wind in Autumn, fly in a day, there is no clear account: but coming over the sea their flight hath been long or very speedy. For I have known them to light so weary on the coast, that many have been taken with dogs, and some knocked down with staves and stones." Further than this, he knew the seasons of their appearing—the Hobby "coming to us in the spring," the Merlin "about autumn." His frequent mention of anatomical peculiarities and of his dissections of many birds and beasts clearly prove his passion for original research, and the frequent records of the contents of the stomachs of the birds which he had the opportunity of examining was a mode of obtaining exact information as to the nature of their food, which I imagine was not common in those days.

      How highly Browne was esteemed by his contemporaries may be judged from the acknowledgments of his assistance by Dugdale, Evelyn (who visited him in Norwich in 1671), and others; and Ray especially mentions his indebtedness to "the deservedly famous Sir Thomas Browne, Professor of Physic in the City of Norwich." His letters to his son, Dr. Edward Browne, are full of instructions as to the course of study he should pursue, and subsequently, when the latter became celebrated and was appointed Physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, it was still to his father that he looked for advice in his hospital practice and in the preparation of his lectures. Browne was proud of his adopted county, a feeling evidently shared by his son, and I trust I may be pardoned for quoting the concluding passage of the latter's account of a tour into Derbyshire, wherein he expresses a sentiment which survives with undiminished force in the breast of many a Norfolk man in the present day. There is a very interesting account of his crossing the Wash on leaving Lynn for Boston, but on his return to Norwich in September, 1662, he thus concludes his journal: "Give me leave to say this much: let any stranger find mee out so pleasant a country, such good way [roads],