TWO SCIENTIFIC WORTHIES. 83 



haps less " fruitless " than it was in Sir Thomas's time, but physi- 

 cians who chance to have scientific tastes will repeat the plaint of 

 envy for those favored ones " whose quiet doors and unmolested 

 hours afford no distractions." 



Browne wrote in addition to scientific work two remarkable 

 general treatises the Religio Medici and Christian Morals ; and 

 indeed on these accounts he has been absolutely appropriated 

 by the literary critic. It is necessary, as we have said, to secure 

 a true point of observation in judging of the science of Sir 

 Thomas Browne so as not to be unfair to him. It is equally 

 necessary to resist the claim of professional authors that Browne 

 is simply a man of letters. Mr. Simon Wilkins, in speaking of 

 the early death of Thomas, the second son of Sir Thomas Browne, 

 says that if he had not been cut off early, his character and talents 

 would have secured to him in the profession he had chosen a dis- 

 tinction not inferior to that his father had attained in the more 

 quiet paths of philosophy and science. But this is a single voice. 

 It is likely that many who hear these words will learn for the first 

 time that Sir Thomas Browne was a savant as well as a literary 

 man. Because Browne took no interest in the theological and 

 political controversies of his time, the writer of the biographical 

 notice in the Encyclopcedia Britannica calls him a psychological 

 curiosity. Allibone in his Dictionary of Authors does not allude to 

 his science. In Johnson's celebrated life of Browne (it is strange 

 that with such lack of sympathy he should have written at all) 

 occurs this passage in reference to the Hydrotophia or Urn 

 Burial : " 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 the 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."' We are 

 properly instructed to bow before the great moralist and thinker, 

 Samuel Johnson ; but for such an estimate as the above (and it is 

 by no means an isolated one in which Johnson held all knowledge 

 of the exact sciences) we can not be alone in confessing to some 

 impatience ! 



No more striking figure is met with in modern biography 

 than that of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles. He was the first to 

 give the learned world knowledge of the mysterious East as ex- 

 pressed in Java and Sumatra. He, like Sir Thomas Browne, has 

 been strangely misjudged by the literary critic. 



Raffles was born in Jamaica in 1781, but was educated in Eng- 



