United States or United Kingdom ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And yet the Discourse of Vulgar Errors, seeming, as it often does, to be a serious refutation of fairy tales arguing, for instance, against the literal truth of the poetic statement that "The pigeon hath no gall," and such questions as "Whether men weigh heavier dead than alive?" being characteristic questions is designed, with much ambition, under its pedantic Greek title Pseudodoxia Epidemica, as a criticism, a cathartic, an instrument for the clarifying of the intellect.
Sir Thomas Browne: Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Bk. IV, Chap. As late as 1699, a thesis was discussed at the Paris Faculty, "Whether comets were harbingers of disease," and in 1707 the Faculty negatived the question propounded in a thesis, "Whether the moon had any sway on the human body."
'He forced Latinisms into his line, Like raw undrilled recruits, that have yet done immense service in his conflicts with the enemy. This pedantry, so inimitable, is unequaled even by the most weighty pages of the 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica' of Sir Thomas Browne. That it should prove obnoxious to some critics only testifies to its perfection and their own incapacity for enjoyment.
He ultimately settled and practised at Norwich. Other books are Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Enquiries into Vulgar Errors , Hydriotaphia, or Urn-burial ; and The Garden of Cyrus in the same year. After his death were pub. his Letter to a Friend and Christian Morals. B. is one of the most original writers in the English language.
For one thing, and that surely not a small thing, we see on every page of the Pseudodoxia the labour, as Dr. Johnson so truly says, that its author was always willing to pay for the truth. And, as Sir Thomas says himself, a work of this nature is not to be performed upon one leg, or without the smell of oil, if it is to be duly and deservedly handled.
The most venerable delusion respecting the elephant, and that which held its ground with unequalled tenacity, is the ancient fallacy which is explained by SIR THOMAS BROWNE in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, that "it hath no joynts; and this absurdity is seconded by another, that being unable to lye downe it sleepeth against a tree, which the hunters observing doe saw almost asunder, whereon the beast relying, by the fall of the tree falls also downe it-selfe and is able to rise no more."
He smiled to see her and took off his great slouch hat. "My beloved Virgilio was overjoyed that I should have found the famous book the veritable Italian edition of Sir Thomas Browne his 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica. A red-letter day for us both! But but " He looked at Jenny's frightened eyes and felt her hand upon his sleeve. "Why, what is wrong? You are alarmed. No ill news of Giuseppe?"
In 1646 he printed his second book, the largest and most operose of all his productions: the 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors' the work evidently of the horæ subsecivæ of many years.
Johnson has said of it, 'The mistakes that the author committed in the Pseudodoxia were not committed by idleness or negligence, but only for want of the philosophy of Boyle and Newton. Who, then, will gird up his loins in our enlightened day to give us a new Pseudodoxia after the philosophy of Bacon and Boyle and Newton and Ewald and Darwin?
The students of Whately and Mill, as well as of Bacon, will greatly enjoy this part of the Pseudodoxia. For its day the Pseudodoxia is a perfect encyclopaedia of scientific, and historical, and literary, and even Biblical criticism: the Pseudodoxia and the Miscellany Tracts taken together.
Word Of The Day