380 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



much everything except theology and state affairs. It was 

 unwise to deal with the first still more unwise to meddle 

 with the second, especially during the Protectorate, seeing 

 that most of the members were devoted royalists. 



In the following year Dr. Thomas Browne, another 

 London physician, published his famous Enquiries into 

 Vulgar and Common Errors 1 a book which represented 

 immense labor in experiment and the collection of curious 

 facts, and which had many editions during its author's 

 lifetime. The popular reception which it encountered is 

 a significant commentary on the changed conditions of the 

 times. Not only was England flooded with copies of it, 

 but it was speedily translated into foreign languages. It 

 was the first systematic and deliberate onslaught upon the 

 popular superstitions and beliefs which had been accepted 

 as true for centuries, and was itself an expression of the 

 skepticism not alone of the author, but of the age. 2 Browne 

 had already written the u Religio Medici," a work which 

 is now classic, and in so doing, had become involved in 

 controversy with Digby, who had explosively replied in a 

 book written in twenty-four hours, part of which time was 

 spent in procuring Browne's work and part in reading it; 

 a proceeding which brought down upon his multitudinous 

 inconsistencies and infirmities the later censure of Browne. 



A collection of all the ancient blunders and traditions 

 concerning the lodestone fills Browne's quaint pages. 3 

 Some of them he refutes in a sensible way; others, in a 

 manner which leaves confusion worse confounded. He 

 records no discoveries of his own, and his theories are 

 borrowed. He followed the Jesuits in the belief that "the 

 earth is a magnetical body," and he adds a bare suggestion 

 to the earlier ideas concerning the tendency of the earth's 

 magnetism to fix its position in space, by saying that the 

 globe "is seated in a convenient medium," thus implying 



Browne: Pseudodoxia Epidemica. London, 1646. 

 "Buckle: History of Civilization. N. Y.. 1877, i., 263. 

 8 Ibid., Chaps, iii. and iv. 



