in the stateliest English. The students of Whately and Mill, as
well as of Bacon, will greatly enjoy this part of the _Pseudodoxia_. _The
Grammar of Assent_, also, would seem to have had some of its deepest
roots in the same powerful, original, and suggestive Book. 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. Some of the most powerful
passages that ever fell from Sir Thomas Browne's pen are to be come upon
in the Introduction to the _Pseudodoxia_. And, with all our immense
advances in method and in discipline: in observation and in discovery: no
true student of nature and of man can afford to neglect the extraordinary
catalogue of things which are so characteristically treated of in Sir
Thomas Browne's great, if, nowadays, out-grown book. 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. It must be left to men
of learning and of science to say how far Sir Thomas has duly and
deservedly handled the immense task he undertook in this book. But I,
for one, have read this great treatise with a true pride, in seeing so
much hard work so liberally laid out according to the best light allowed
its author in that day. As Dr. 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? And after Sir Thomas's own philosophy,
which he thus sets forth before himself in this and in all his other
studies: 'We are not magisterial in opinions, nor have we dictator-like
obtruded our conceptions: but, in the humility of inquiries or
disquisitions, have only proposed them to more ocular discerners. And we
shall so far encourage contradiction as to promise no disturbance, or re-
oppose any pen, that shall fallaciously or captiously refute us. And
shall only take notice of such whose experimental and ju