Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/93

Rh How pregnant his inquiries! How trenchant his comments! A phrase suggests the beginnings of new sciences. His phraseology is cumbersome and pedantic, yet in startling ways he will use poetical expressions in the midst of learned comments that carry the mind along vistas of the imagination. He was a physician, and, while giving only his leisure to science and literature, he became a leading authority in the zoölogy and botany of Great Britain. He introduced the word "commensality," now in common



use, to express a state of many living together, as it were, at the same table. This word is mentioned by Johnson as an example of a useful term which if rejected must be supplied by circumlocution. Browne was a pioneer in the scientific study of graves and their contents. He appreciated the value of fossils. He was also a comparative anatomist, and constantly engaged in such topics as the anatomy of the horse, the pigeon, the beaver the badger, the whale. In a note on an autopsy of a spermaceti whale the following passage occurs: "It contained no less than sixty feet in length, the head somewhat peculiar, with a large prominence over the mouth; teeth only in the lower jaw, received