CHAPTER III. 



DR. THOMAS BROWN AND DR. ERASMUS DARWIN. 



WE have certainly, in the preceding, a long enough 

 digression, the principal purpose of which as it arose was 

 simply to show (with a glance at contemporary philo- 

 sophy then) what sort of a man, as a philosopher, 

 Thomas Brown was that sent its author his Observations 

 on Dr. Darwin's Zoonomia. But Brown was not exactly 

 then the great Dr. Brown whom we have just portrayed. 

 No; Brown, doubtless, might always have been righteously 

 called expatiating Brown ; but, at the age of eighteen, 

 when he wrote his Observations, he must have been 

 expatiation itself. At that age he belonged to a select 

 circle of warm-hearted, warm-headed boys that, nightly, 

 took counsel over their tea-cups for the benefit of the 

 human race. Young men of an Edinburgh mutual im- 

 provement society that write, and read, and debate over 

 tea the greater part of the night such young men can- 

 not choose but expatiate. And it is just for such 

 quality that no one can look into the Lectures of Dr. 

 Thomas Brown without being struck with admiration at 

 the structure of their every paragraph. Clause after 

 clause how happily they dovetail how happily they 

 fit into each other each falling so neatly, naturally, 

 into a place that just seems made for it. They are 

 extemporaneous, these Lectures : their author has just got 



