Read The Major Works (English Library) Online
Authors: Sir Thomas Browne
The Major Works (English Library) (52 page)
He appears, indeed, to have been willing to pay labour for truth. Having heard a flying rumour of sympathetick needles, by which, suspended over a circular alphabet, distant friends or lovers might correspond, 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 motionless, 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 contempt and ridicule,
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though the opinion, which admits it, was then growing popular, and was, surely, plausible, even before it was confirmed by later observations.
The reputation of Browne encouraged some low writer to
publish, under his name, a book called ‘Nature’s cabinet unlocked,’
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translated, according to Wood, from the physicks of Magirus; of which Browne took care to clear himself, by modestly advertising, that ‘if any man had been benefited by it, he was not so ambitious as to challenge the honour thereof, as having no hand in that work.’
In 1658 the discovery of some antient urns in Norfolk gave him occasion to write
Hydriotaphia, Urnburial, or a discourse of Sepulchral urns
, in which he treats with his usual learning on the funeral rites of the antient nations; exhibits their various treatment of the dead; and examines the substances found in his Norfolcian urns. There is, perhaps, none of his works which better exemplifies his reading or memory. It is scarcely to be imagined, how many particulars he has amassed together, in a treatise which seems to have been occasionally written; and for which, therefore, no materials could have been previously collected. It is, indeed, like other treatises of antiquity, rather for curiosity than use; for it is of small importance to know which nation buried their dead in the ground, which threw them into the sea, or which gave them to birds and beasts; when the practice of cremation began, or when it was disused; whether the bones of different persons were mingled in the same urn; what oblations were thrown into the pyre; or how the ashes of the body were distinguished from those of other substances. Of the uselesness of all these enquiries, Browne seems not to have been ignorant; and, therefore, concludes them with an observation which can never be too frequently recollected.
‘All or most apprehensions rested in opinions of some future being, which ignorantly or coldly believed, begat those perverted conceptions, ceremonies, sayings, which christians pity or laugh at. Happy are they, which live not in that disadvantage of time, when men could say little for futurity, but from reason; whereby the noblest mind fell often upon doubtful deaths, and melancholy dissolutions: with these hopes Socrates warmed his doubtful spirits, against the cold potion; and Cato, before he durst give the fatal stroke, spent part of
the night in reading the Immortality of Plato, thereby confirming his wavering hand unto the animosity of that attempt.
It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no further state to come, unto which this seems progressional, and otherwise made in vain: without this accomplishment, the natural expectation and desire of such a state, were but a fallacy in nature; unsatisfied considerators would quarrel the justice of their constitution, and rest content that Adam had fallen lower, whereby, by knowing no other original, and deeper ignorance of themselves, they might have enjoyed the happiness of inferior creatures, who in tranquillity possess their constitutions, as having not the apprehension to deplore their own natures; and being framed below the circumference of these hopes or cognition of better things, the wisdom of God hath necessitated their contentment. But the superior ingredient and obscured part of ourselves, whereto all present felicities afford no resting contentment, will be able at last to tell us we are more than our present selves; and evacuate such hopes in the fruition of their own accomplishments.’ (
above, pp. 305–6
).
To his treatise on
Urnburial
was added
The garden of Cyrus, or the quincunxial lozenge, or network plantation of the antients, artificially, naturally, mystically considered
. This discourse he begins with the Sacred Garden, in which the first man was placed; and deduces the practice of horticulture from the earliest accounts of antiquity to the time of the Persian Cyrus, the first man whom we actually know to have planted a Quincunx; which, however, our author is inclined to believe of longer date, and not only discovers it in the description of the hanging gardens of Babylon, but seems willing to believe, and to persuade his reader, that it was practised by the seeders on vegetables before the flood.
Some of the most pleasing performances have been produced by learning and genius exercised upon subjects of little importance. It seems to have been, in all ages, the pride of wit, to
shew how it could exalt the low, and amplify the little. To speak not inadequately of things really and naturally great, is a task not only difficult but disagreeable; because the writer is degraded in his own eyes by standing in comparison with his subject, to which he can hope to add nothing from his imagination: but it is a perpetual triumph of fancy to expand a scanty theme, to raise glittering ideas from obscure properties, and to produce to the world an object of wonder to which nature had contributed little. To this ambition, perhaps, we owe the Frogs of Homer, the Gnat and the Bees of Virgil, the Butterfly of Spenser, the Shadow of Wowerus,
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and the Quincunx of Browne.
In the prosecution of this sport of fancy, he considers every production of art and nature, in which he could find any decussation or approaches to the form of a Quincunx; and as a man once resolved upon ideal discoveries, seldom searches long in vain, he finds his favourite figure in almost every thing, whether natural or invented, antient or modern, rude or artificial, sacred and civil; so that a reader, not watchful against the power of his infusions, would imagine that decussation was the great business of the world, and that nature and art had no other purpose than to exemplify and imitate a Quincunx.
To shew the excellence of this figure, he enumerates all its properties; and finds in it almost every thing of use or pleasure: and to shew how readily he supplies what he cannot find, one instance may be sufficient; ‘though therein (says he) we meet not with right angles, yet every rhombus containing four angles equal unto two right, it virtually contains two right in every one.’
The fanciful sports of great minds are never without some advantage to knowledge. Browne has interspersed many curious observations on the form of plants, and the laws of vegetation; and appears to have been a very accurate observer of the modes of germination, and to have watched with great
nicety the evolution of the parts of plants from their feminal principles.
He is then naturally led to treat of the number five; and finds, that by this number many things are circumscribed; that there are five kinds of vegetable productions, five sections of a cone, five orders of architecture, and five acts of a play. And observing that five was the antient conjugal or wedding number, he proceeds to a speculation which I shall give in his own words; ‘The antient numerists made out the conjugal number by two and three, the first parity and imparity, the active and passive digits, the material and formal principles in generative societies.’
These are all the tracts which he published: but many papers were found in his closet, ‘Some of them, (says Whitefoot) designed for the press, were often transcribed and corrected by his own hand, after the fashion of great and curious writers.’
Of these, two collections have been published; one by Dr. Tennison, the other in 1722 by a nameless editor.
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Whether the one or the other selected those pieces which the author would have preferred, cannot now be known: but they have both the merit of giving to mankind what was too valuable to be suppressed; and what might, without their interposition, have, perhaps, perished among other innumerable labours of learned men, or have been burnt in a scarcity of fuel like the papers of Pereskius.
The first of these posthumous treatises contains ‘Observations upon several plants mentioned in Scripture.’ These remarks, though they do not immediately either rectify the faith, or refine the morals of the reader, yet are by no means to be censured as superfluous niceties or useless speculations; for they often shew some propriety of description, or elegance of allusion, utterly undiscoverable to readers not skilled in oriental botany; and are often of more important use, as they remove some difficulty from narratives, or some obscurity from precepts.
The next is ‘Of garlands, or coronary and garland plants;’ a
subject merely of learned curiosity, without any other end than the pleasure of reflecting on antient customs, or on the industry with which studious men have endeavoured to recover them.
The next is a letter, ‘on the fishes eaten by our Saviour with his disciples, after his resurrection from the dead;’ which contains no determinate resolution of the question, what they were, for indeed it cannot be determined. All the information that diligence or learning could supply, consists in an enumeration of the fishes produced in the waters of Judea.
Then follow ‘Answers to certain queries about fishes, birds, and insects;’ and ‘A letter of hawks and falconry antient and modern:’ in the first of which he gives the proper interpretation of some antient names of animals, commonly mistaken; and in the other has some curious observations on the art of hawking, which he considers as a practice unknown to the antients. I believe all our sports of the field are of Gothick original; the antients neither hunted by the scent, nor seem much to have practised horsemanship as an exercise; and though, in their works, there is mention of ‘aucupium’ and ‘piscatio,’
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they seem no more to have been considered as diversions, than agriculture or any other manual labour.
In two more letters he speaks of ‘the cymbals of the Hebrews,’ but without any satisfactory determination; and of ‘repalick or gradual verses,’ that is, of verses beginning with a word of one syllable, and proceeding by words of which each has a syllable more than the former; as,
O Deus, æternæ stationis conciliator.
Ausonius
.
and, after his manner, pursuing the hint, he mentions many other restrained methods of versifying, to which industrious ignorance has sometimes voluntarily subjected itself.
His next attempt is ‘On languages, and particularly the Saxon tongue.’ He discourses with great learning, and generally with great justness, of the derivation and changes of languages; but, like other men of multifarious learning, he receives some notions without examination. Thus he observes, according to
the popular opinion, that the Spaniards have retained so much Latin, as to be able to compose sentences that shall be at once gramatically Latin and Castilian: this will appear very unlikely to a man that considers the Spanish terminations; and Howel, who was eminently skilful in the three provincial languages, declares, that after many essays he never could effect it.
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The principal design of this letter, is to shew the affinity between the modern English and the antient Saxon; and he observes, very rightly, that ‘though we have borrowed many substantives, adjectives, and some verbs, from the French; yet the great body of numerals, auxiliary verbs, articles, pronouns, adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions, which are the distinguishing and lasting parts of a language, remain with us from the Saxon.’
To prove this position more evidently, he has drawn up a short discourse of six paragraphs, in Saxon and English; of which every word is the same in both languages, excepting the terminations and orthography. The words are, indeed, Saxon, but the phraseology is English; and, I think, would not have been understood by Bede or Ælfric, notwithstanding the confidence of our author. He has, however, sufficiently proved his position, that the English resembles its parental language, more than any modern European dialect.
There remain five tracts of this collection yet unmentioned; one ‘Of artificial hills, mounts, or burrows, in England;’ in reply to an interrogatory letter of E. D. whom the writers of
Biographia Britannica
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suppose to be, if rightly printed, W. D. or Sir William Dugdale, one of Browne’s correspondents. These are declared by Browne, in concurrence, I think, with all other antiquarians, to be for the most part funeral monuments. He proves, that both the Danes and Saxons buried their men of eminence under piles of earth, ‘which admitting (says he) neitherornament, epitaph, nor inscription, may, if earthquakes spare them, outlast other monuments: obelisks have their term, and pyramids will tumble; but these mountainous monuments
may stand, and are like to have the same period with the earth.’
In the next, he answers two geographical questions; one concerning Troas, mentioned in the Acts and Epistles of St. Paul, which he determines to be the city built near the antient Ilium; and the other concerning the dead sea, of which he gives the same account with other writers.
Another letter treats ‘Of the answers of the oracle of Apollo at Delphos, to Cræsus king of Lydia.’ In this tract nothing deserves notice, more than that Browne considers the oracles as evidently and indubitably supernatural, and sounds all his disquisition upon that postulate. He wonders why the physiologists of old, having such means of instruction, did not inquire into the secrets of nature: but judiciously concludes, that such questions would probably have been vain; ‘for, in matters cognoscible, and formed for our disquisition, our industry must be our oracle, and reason our Apollo.’