s crusade against "vulgar errors," there is no real significance.
The Religio Medici is a contribution, not to faith, but to piety; a
refinement and correction, such as piety often stands in need of; a
help, not so much to religious belief in a world of doubt, as to the
maintenance of the religious mood amid the interests of a secular
calling.

From about this time Browne's letters afford a pretty clear view of his
life as it passed in the house at Norwich. Many of these letters
represent him in correspondence with the singular men who shared his
own half poetic, half scientific turn of mind, with that impressibility
towards what one might call the thaumaturgic elements in nature which
has often made men dupes, and which is certainly an element in the
somewhat atrabiliar mental complexion of that age in England. He
corresponds seriously with William Lily, the astrologer; is acquainted
[139] with Dr. Dee, who had some connexion with Norwich, and has
"often heard him affirm, sometimes with oaths, that he had seen
transmutation of pewter dishes and flagons into silver (at least) which
the goldsmiths at Prague bought of him." Browne is certainly an honest
investigator; but it is still with a faint hope of something like that
upon fitting occasion, and on the alert always for surprises in nature
(as if nature had a rhetoric, at times, to deliver to us, like those
sudden and surprising flowers of his own poetic style) that he listens
to her everyday talk so attentively. Of strange animals, strange cures,
and the like, his correspondence is full. The very errors he combats
are, of course, the curiosities of error--those fascinating,
irresistible, popular, errors, which various kinds of people have
insisted on gliding into because they like them. Even his heresies
were old ones--the very fossils of capricious opinion.

It is as an industrious local naturalist that Browne comes before us
first, full of the fantastic minute life in the fens and "Broads"
around Norwich, its various sea and marsh birds. He is something of a
vivisectionist also, and we may not be surprised at it, perhaps, in an
age which, for the propagation of truth, was ready to cut off men's
ears. He finds one day "a Scarabaus capricornus odoratus," which he
takes "to be mentioned by Monfetus, folio 150. He saith, 'Nucem
moschatam et cinnamomum vere spirat'--[140] but to me it smelt like
roses, santalum, and ambergris." "Musca tuliparum moschata," agai