Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/95

Rh less "fruitless" than it was in Sir Thomas's time, but physicians 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 distinction 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 Encyclopædia 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 expressed 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