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556J  Browne  Thomas 1605-1682

The Works Of the Learned Sr Thomas Brown, Kt. Doctor of Physick, late of Norwich. Containing I. Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors. II. Religio Medici: With Annotations and Observations upon it. III. Hydriotaphia; or, Urn-Burial: Together with The Garden of Cyrus. IV. Certain Miscellany Tracts. with Alphabetical Tables.

London: Tho. Basset, Ric. Chiswell, Tho. Sawbridge, Charles Mearn, and Charles Brome, 1686                                                       $2200

Folio 33 x 19 cm. Signatures: A⁶, (a)⁴, B-Z⁴, Aa-Zz⁴, Aaa-Iii⁴, Kkk⁶, Lll-Qqq⁴, Rrr⁶, Sss-Zzz⁴, Aaaa-Dddd⁴, Eeee². This copy has the rare portrait of Browne by R. White; the engraving of the urns is bound before the Hydriotaphia, and the engraving of the quinqunx is bound opposite the title for the Garden of Cyrus.  This copy is in good condition. It is bound in full modern calf.

“[Thomas Browne’s] affluence and established residence (the transport of a collection containing many folio volumes is not lightly to be undertaken) enabled him to build up in ten years or so the substantial scholarly library which provided the materials for his longest work, Pseudodoxia Epidemica. First published in 1646, it was revised and expanded in successive editions up to the sixth in 1672. In it Browne took up a suggestion by Bacon in his Advancement of Learning that there should be compiled a list of erroneous beliefs held at that time in the fields of the natural sciences and general knowledge. Browne went further, and, by combining in his disquisition on each topic the testimonies of authority, reason, and experiment, endeavored to dispose once for all of some hundreds of fallacies. The work, executed with wide learning, wit, and characteristic style, immediately established his reputation as a savant, remaining popular at home and abroad for at least a century.” (Robbins) 

“Browne is more scientific than Bacon when he discusses some notions already touched in Sylva Sylvarum: for instance, that coral is soft under water and hardens in the air; that a salamander can live in and extinguish fire (if ancient tradition is true, says Bacon, the creature has a very close skin and some very cold ‘virtue’); that the chameleon lives on air (Bacon makes air its ‘principall Sustenance’ but admits flies as well). In the examination of these and other arresting items in his encyclopedia, Browne appeals to critical authority, reason, and experience; of these criteria only the last is strictly Baconian. But Browne was in fact a tireless observer and experimenter. And when a whale was thrown upon the coast of Norfolk he verified his notion of spermaceti; in later years he was able, through his son, to test the belief that ‘the

’—after swallowing a nugget the bird died ‘of a soden.’ But in the settling of a more commonplace problem, the reputed inequality of the badger’s legs, the mere report of the senses appears, happily for readers, to count less than abstract and almost metaphysical logic. Many exotic and ‘occult’ traditions were less readily verifiable by experience, and in this un-Baconian realm Browne of necessity relied upon reason and the weighing of authorities. ” (Bush)

Browne’s works are as delightful and as varied as the man himself. “A man of enormous learning and prodigious memory, Browne was also whimsical, eccentric, and superstitious—a paradoxical mixture of medieval lore, Baconian science, and great intellectual curiosity. […] Browne’s religious position in Religio Medici and his other works is that of a cultivated, tolerant Roman stoic thoroughly knowledgeable of Bacon’s foolish idols but emotionally aligned to the ceremonial and ritualistic Anglican religion of John Donne, George Herbert, and Lancelot Andrewes. His Religio Medici covers much the same ground as Richard Hooker’s Of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, but does so with the brilliant speculations of Montaigne, coupled with his own characteristic tone of ‘love and wonder.’ For Browne there is no tension between faith and reason, and doubt is not agony but occasion for paradoxical joy.” (Ruoff, Elizabethan and Stuart)

In the present work, the following subjects are treated: “I. Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors. II. Religio Medici: With Annotations and Observations upon it. III. Hydriotaphia; or, Urn-Burial: Together with The Garden of Cyrus. IV.  and the Certain Miscellany Tracts,” which further contains “I. Observations upon several Plants mentioned in Scripture; II. Of Garlands, and Coronary or Garland-plants; III. Of the Fishes eaten by our Saviour with his Disciples after the Resurrection from the dead; IV. An Answer to certain Queries relating to Fishes, Birds, Insects; V. Of Hawks and Falconry, ancient and modern; VI. Of Cymbals, &c.; VII. Of Ropalic or Gradual Verses, &c.; VIII. Of Languages, and particularly of the Saxon-Tongue; IX. Of Artificial Hills, Mounts or Boroughs in many parts of England: what they are, and to what end raised, and by what Nations; X. Of Troas, what place is meant by that Name. Also of the situations of Sodom, Gomorrah, Zeboim, in the Dead Sea; XI. Of the Answers of the Oracle of Apollo at Delphos to Croesus King of Lydia; XII. A Prophecy concerning the future state of several Nations; in a Letter written upon occasion of an old Prophecy sent to the Author from a Friend, with a request that he would consider it; XIII. Musaeum Clausum, or Bibliotheca Abscondita: containing some remarkable Books, Antiquities, Pictures and Rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living.”

“Hydriotaphia is the leisurely excursion of a scholarly mind into the burial customs of past nations, and The Garden of Cyrus a pursuit of a number and form through art, nature, and philosophy. […] Hydriotaphia has been considered by George Williamson as a dissertation on human identity and the quest for its immortal retention. Its sections develop from the initial ease of identifying the purpose of the relics discussed, through a consideration of their failure to achieve this purpose—in that it is difficult to date such relics, let alone put a name to them—to the orthodox Christian consolation of expected resurrection, and the vanity by contrast of all earthly monuments. […] Likewise, The Garden of Cyrus is no horticultural handbook: rather, its pentatonic groves and thickets are a musical score transposed into verbal imagery, a reading of ‘that universal and public manuscript’ of the great Platonic Idea, of ‘that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God.’” (Robbins)

Wing B-5150.