Arthur Keith wrote that ‘he settled near Halifax to practise as a physician, and no patients coming, he allowed his brain to brood over the problems which force themselves on the attention of every man who takes life’s journey seriously’.
He settled in Norwich where he practised as a doctor. In 1643 he published a controversial text Religio Medici, The Faith of a Doctor; this was followed in 1646 with Pseudodoxia Epidemica, An Enquiry into Common False Beliefs, an important document in the history of science, which debunks a number of myths.
Two later texts are Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, which explores the nature of funerary customs, our concern for our bones after death, and the transience of fame; and The Garden of Cyrus, an exploration of the incidence in nature of the quincunx, the spatial arrangement of five units as in the five on gaming dice. They were published together in 1658.
Thomas Browne was knighted in 1671 and died in 1682.
Browne stands at the junction of the old world with the new, a believer in both science and superstition. His work is driven by empirical observation, but in 1662 his evidence helped condemn of two women accused of witchcraft.
Arthur Keith states that: ‘At one moment he is dominated by reason, and at the next he is led by blind faith or mastered by a deeply rooted desire’.
But Keith was influenced by the desire for an English missing link: ‘he was ‘of pure English ancestry … His brain, which at one moment separated fact from fancy, with the utmost perspicacity, in the next embraced a belief in spells, incantations, sorceries.’
His work is characterized by the creative invention of words. Thomas Munks wrote of his style of writing:
His style is indeed a tissue of many languages – a mixture of heterogeneous words, brought together from distant regions, with terms originally appropriated to one art and drawn by violence into the service of another. He must, however, be confessed to have augmented our philosophical diction; and in defence of his uncommon words and expressions, we must consider that he had uncommon sentiments, and was not content to express in many words that idea for which any language could supply a single term. But his innovations are sometimes pleasing and his temerities happy; he has many ‘verba ardentia’; forcible expressions, which he would never have found but by venturing to the utmost verge of propriety; and flights which would never have been reached but by one who had very little fear of the shame of falling’.
Browne introduced into English 769 words, including: additionally, ambidextrous, approximate, botanist, equable, ferocious, hallucination, inconsistent, mistle thrush.
But also: glandulosity, latirostrous, and opodeldoc.
Despite his faith, there is a lasting fear of what happens after death, not to the soul, but the body.
‘To be knav’d out of our graves, to have our sculls made drinking bowls, and our bones turned into pipes, to delight and sport our enemies, are Tragical Abominations.’
And considering how the body may be plundered for medicine for the living: ‘Mummie is become merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams.’ Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial Ch 4
From The diary of John Evelyn
17thOctober 1671
'Sir Thomas Browne’s house & garden being a paradise and cabinet of rarities, and that of the best collection, especially medails, books, plants and natural things. Amongst other curiosities, Sir Thomas had a collection of the eggs of all the fowle and birds he could procure, that country (especially the promontory of Norfolk) being frequented, as he said, by severall kinds which seldom or never go farther into the land, as cranes, storkes, eagles, and a variety of water-fowle.'
Nothing remains of Sir Thomas Browne’s collections but a work called Musaeum Clausum, 'The Sealed Museum', a list of imagined objects, including
Item No 8 in Section Three, 'Antiquities and Rarities of Severall Sorts':
‘A large Ostridges Egg, whereon is neatly and fully wrought that famous Battel of Alcazar, in which three Kings lost their lives’.
As to the Battle of the Three Kings, we do not know which text Thomas Browne had in mind. Two plays published around 1600 deal with the story: ‘The Battle of Alcazar’ by George Peele, and the unattributed ‘The Famous History of the Life and Death of Capt Thomas Stukeley’. A more likely source for Browne’s interest was the 1650 ballad ‘The Life and Death of the famous Thomas Stukeley An English Gallant in time of Queen Elizabeth, who ended his Life in a Battel of three Kings of Barbary.’
The Battle of Alcazar, more correctly El-al-Quibir, in Morocco, was fought on 4 August 1578, between European and Moorish forces and an army of Moors and Ottoman Turks. The young and militantly Christian King Sebastian of Portugal had in 1574 mounted a raid on Tangier, in response to concerns about Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean. Four years later Abu Abdallah Mohammed II Saadi asked Sebastian to help him recover his throne, which his uncle Abd Al-Malik had usurped with the help of the Ottoman army. Sebastian’s army of 23,000 consisted of English, Italian and German mercenaries, some of whom had been marshalled for an expedition to invade Ireland, financed by the Pope, and led by the English adventurer Sir Thomas Stukeley. In the battle Dom Sebastian was killed, Abu Abdallah Mohammed was drowned while trying to escape, and Abd Al-Malik died of natural causes. The battle was thus known as the Battle of the Three Kings.
The body of Dom Sebastian was not found, leading to legends that he never died. Amongst the dead was Sir Thomas Stukeley, an English adventurer who, when he was presented to Queen Elizabeth had stated that he ‘would rather be the sovereign of a molehill than the subject of the greatest king in Christendom’. In Spain and later Italy he tried to find backing for an invasion of Ireland, and commanded three galleys at the battle of Lepanto, where he fought bravely. He joined the expedition to Morocco, where he died in command of the centre of the army; but the ballad stated that he was killed by his own troops at the end of the battle, a ‘stately temple … with golden turrets’ being built over his grave.
The loss of the Portuguese monarchy and nobility led to Portugal being annexed into the Spanish Empire; with control of the Portuguese colonies, coastline, spice trade, ports and fleet, Spain was able to concentrate vastly more resources on its northern European concerns, including the launching of the Great Armada. Moorish naval expansion beyond the western Mediterranean led to an increase in the slave-raids on the coasts of the British Isles, which Browne would have been aware of.
Some years later, in January 1682 the Court of St James received an embassy from the Sultan of Morocco, as part of the diplomacy surrounding British colonial ambitions in North Africa. In the words of Browne, ‘The king believing that a commerce between the Emperor and this kingdome might prove of great advantage to us, we having soe fit a place for a staple or stoorhous of our own commodities upon their continent as Tangers.’
Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, 18 Jan 1682: ‘The Ambassador’s present consisted of 2 lyons and 30 Ostriches; at which his majesty laughed, and said he knew nothing more proper to send by way of return than a flock of geese’. Actually 300 flintlock muskets were sent.
Browne to his son Edward in London, 13 January 1682:
‘I thank you for the account of the Ambassador of the King of Fez and Morocco. You did well to give a visit unto a person so unusual and so much talked of. … There being so many ostriches brought over tis likely some of them will be brought about to show, & hither as soon as other parts out of London. If any of them die, I believe it will be dissected. They have odd feet and strong thighs and legges. Perhaps the King will put 3 or 4 of these ostriches in St James park and give the rest away to some noblemen.’
The ostriches were put into St James Park, while the two lions were sent to the Royal Menagerie at The Tower. Evidently some of the ostriches were given away. Browne was interested to see whether the ostrich lived up to any of the stories told about it.
Browne to his son Edward in London, 3 February 1682
‘I believe you must bee carefull of your ostrich this return of cold weather, lest it perish by it being bred in so hot a country and perhaps not seen snow before or very seldom. … You must have it observed how it sleepeth and whether not with the head under the wing, especially in cold weather; whether it be a watchful and quick hearing bird like a goose, for it seems to bee like a goose in many circumstances. To geese they give oats etc moistened with beer, but sometimes they are inebriated with it. If you give any iron, it may be wrapped up in dough or paste; perhaps it will not take it up alone. You may try whether it will eat a worm or a very small eel. If it delights not in salt things you may try it with an olive.’
On 4 February Edward Browne wrote :
‘The ostridge died in the night; these cold nights I thinke killed him’.
Browne to his son Edward in London 10 February 1682
‘ I am glad you have done so much, if not in a manner all, in your ostridge business. … [the anatomisation of the ostrich had evidently been initiated]. The brain is said to be but little. The guts were of a strange length and so were the inestina remarkable, and the numerous glandules in the coates of their stomack wonderful.’
Evidently Browne acquired an ostrich himself: in ‘Notes and Experiments’ he writes: ‘When it first came into my garden it soone ate up all the gillyflowers, Tulip leaves, & fed greedily upon what was green, as lettuce, endive, sorrel: it would feed upon oates, barley, pease, beanes, swallow onions, eats sheeps lights and livers’.
‘When it tooke downe a large onyon it stuck awhile in the Gula & did not descend directly, butt would backward behind the neck whereby I might perceave that the Gullett turned much …’
Sir Thomas believed that God is revealed in two ways, by scripture and through nature. It therefore behoves us to study nature, to know its secrets and to correct any misapprehensions, to create a marriage of faith and science. But the ostrich puzzles him. There are simple mistakes to be explored and confounded. The ostrich does not bury its head in the ground, at least not the ground of his garden in Norwich, a fallacy he traces back to Pliny.
But what isthe ostrich? A bird, yes, but with wings that do not function. It lays eggs; but it might be a form of biped. It has eyelashes, long and luxuriant, but only on the upper lid. It has two toes. ‘It made sometimes a very strange noise, had a very odd note especially in the morning and perhaps when hungry.'
From Vulgar Errors
‘The common opinionof the Ostrich, Struthiocamelusor Sparrow-Camel, conceives that it digesteth Iron; and this is confirmed by the affirmations of many; beside swarms of others, Rhodiginusin his prelections taketh it for granted, Johannes Langiusin his Epistles pleadeth experiment for it;the common picture also confirmeth it, which usually describeth this Animal with an Horshoe in its mouth. Notwithstanding upon enquiry we find it very questionable, and the negative seems most reasonably entertained.
Now beside experiment, it is in vain to attempt against it by Philosophical argument, it being an occult quality, which contemns the law of Reason, and defends it self by admitting no reason at all. As for its possibility we shall not at present dispute; nor will we affirm that Iron indigested, receiveth in the stomack of the Ostrichno alteration at all; but if any such there be, we suspect this effect rather from some way of corrosion, than any of digestion; nor any liquid reduction or tendance to chilification by the power of natural heat, but rather some attrition from an acide and vitriolous humidity in the stomack, which may absterse and shave the scorious parts thereof. So rusty Iron crammed down the throat of a Cock, will become terse and clear again in its gizzard.
The ground of this conceit is its swallowing down fragments of Iron, which men observing, by a forward illation, have therefore conceived it digesteth them; which is an inference not to be admitted, as being a fallacy of the consequent, that is, concluding a position of the consequent, from the position of the antecedent. For many things are swallowed by animals, rather for condiment, gust or medicament, then any substantial nutriment. So Poultrey, and especially the Turkey, do of themselves take down stones; and we have found at one time in the gizzard of a Turkey no less then seven hundred.
Thus also we swallow Cherry-stones, but void them unconcocted, and we usually say they preserve us from surfet; for being hard bodies they conceive a strong and durable heat in the stomack, and so prevent the crudities of their fruit: And upon the like reason do culinary operators observe, that flesh boiles best, when the bones are boiled with it.
That therefore an Ostrich will swallow and take down Iron, is easily to be granted: that oftentimes it pass entire away, if we admit of ocular testimony not to be denied. And though some experiment may also plead, that sometimes they are so altered, as not to be found or excluded in any discernable parcels: yet whether this be not effected by some way of corrosion, from sharp and dissolving humidities, rather then any proper digestion, chilifactive mutation, or alimental conversion, is with good reason doubted.’
He notes also:
‘It is much that Cardanus should be mistaken with a great part of men that the coloured and dyed feathers of oestridges were natural, as red, blue, narrow greeene, whereas the natural colours in this bird were white and grayish.’
And ‘The Emperor Heliogabalus had a phancy for the braynes when he brought six hundred ostrich heads to one supper only for the braynes sake.'
Fact:
The gut of the ostrich is 26 feet long. Food is retained in the gut for 36 hours. They have two toes, and lay eggs with an interval of one day between egg. The majority of the space of the cranial cavity of an ostrich is taken up with the eyes, each one occupying almost as much space as the brain.
The most familiar habit of the bird, that of burying its head in the sand, is wholly untrue, a fallacy attributed to Pliny. The bird’s aimless running when panicked has led to its being regarded as stupid; sixty-five per cent of its cranial cavity is occupied by its eyes.
Its feathers and eggs are used as symbols for other ideas: The feathers were adopted as identifying signs of strength and virility in battle by Crusading soldiers, despite the fact that that the bird’s habitat at that time was largely in Muslim territory; later they were used by English royalty, continuing an association with royalty that can be traced back to the ancient Egyptians.
The eggs have been used in places of worship since antiquity, including in Ottoman mosques; in Coptic churches they are still used, to symbolise steadfast watchfulness. A belief states that an ostrich keeps a close guard over its buried eggs; in St Catherine’s monastery ostrich eggs shade the gold lamps that hang from the ceiling. Eggs are often placed by icon carriers, a reminder that as the ostrich protects its eggs so believers should surround themselves with devotion to God.
It was supposed that the egg hatched through the unceasing rigour of its parent’s gaze. Farmed ostriches often abandon their eggs, but in the wild have been known to kill human egg-thieves. The ostrich egg is also used as a symbol for meditation on God’s care, for the birth of Jesus, for Jesus’ awakening from the tomb, for God’s creation, and above all other eggs, as the symbol of the resurrected Christ.
Yet the bird was also believed to abandon its eggs to hatch alone, warmed by the sun, for which it was castigated as a thoughtless parent. But the abandoned egg symbolised earthly values, while the ostrich was used as a metaphor for the bird relying on God’s protection to oversee its young while it fixed its attention on heaven. The bird also appeared in mediaeval bestiaries symbolising hypocrisy, as it opens its wings to fly, but cannot.
The ostrich lays the largest egg produced by a bird; but considering the size ratio between egg and adult bird, the ostrich egg is the smallest among birds. The scientific name for the bird Struthio camelus alludes to thebird’s neck, yet the first part of its name is Greek for “sparrow”. Linaeus assigned the name Struthio Camelus on the grounds that travellers in the desert often saw flocks of ostrich, which they thought were camels.
Some history of ostrich eggs:
In Hydriotaphia, Urn Buriall Browne notes how eggshells escaped corruption in the tomb, the hollow space preserved within the hollow space, the skull within the sepulchre.
‘In a long deserted habitation, even egge-shels have been found fresh, not tending to corruption.’ Hydriotaphia, Urn Buriall Ch 3
From Africa to China ostrich eggshell fragments have been found at excavated sites dating from the Palaeolithic. These include decorated fragments dating from 30,000 years ago; the Neolithic Yangshao culture engraved the eggshells of now-extinct ostriches. Some finds recently dated take the story back even further. News reports in early 2010 relate to marks found on ostrich eggshells dated to 60,000 years ago. The marks were made on shells that had been used as water flasks, in a period before homo sapiens had started to move out of Africa.
The four different patterns and markings are repeated and believed to convey ownership or purpose and to differentiate the eggs from each other.
The researchers said that before this discovery, the first signs of art, writing or 'culture' was thought to have been first shown in the late Stone Age between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago. This discovery showed "collective identities and individual expressions" that were the beginning of modern civilised behaviour, they said. Researchers examined 270 inch long egg fragments, found in the Diepkloof Rock Shelter, Western Cape, South Africa. They identify four different patterns including cross hatching and parallel lines, etched onto the side of the eggs.
From Ostrich Farming in a Nutshell for beginners, Donald W Allen, 1911
An ostrich will eat almost anything it can swallow, including green matter, aloes, mangels, and monganas.
Ostriches turn their eggs over.
Ostrich eggs take 42 days to hatch.
To check for fertility, kneel down on one knee, pull your coat over your head, then take an egg and hold it well away in front of your face, placing half the egg inside the coat in an upright position. Pull the material tightly round the gg, shutting out all light from the inside half; now hold the egg up to the sun with the air-space on top. If the egg is hatching it should show a dark spot on one side.
[In other words, you may find what you seek by looking through it at something else].
Aristotle on the ostrich:
The Libyan ostrich … has some of the characters of a bird, some of the characters of a quadruped. It differs from a quadruped in being feathered; and from a bird in being unable to soar aloft and in having feathers that resemble hair and are useless for flight. Again, it agrees with quadrupeds in having upper eyelashes, which are the more richly supplied with hairs because the parts about the head and the upper portion of the neck are bare; and it agrees with birds in being feathered in all the parts posterior to these. Further, it resembles a bird in being a biped, and a quadruped in having a cloven hoof; for it has hoofs and not toes. The explanation of these peculiarities is to be found in its bulk, which is that of a quadruped rather than that of a bird. For, speaking generally, a bird must necessarily be of very small size. For a body of heavy bulk can with difficulty be raised into the air.
Simon Wilkin (editor of Browne’s works):
‘The ostrich is naturally herbivorous; but though vegetable matter constitutes the basis of its food, and though it is often seen pasturing in the South of Africa, it is yet so voracious, and its senses of taste and smell are so obtuse, that it devours animal and mineral substances indiscriminately, until its enormous stomach is completely full. It swallows without any choice, and merely as it were for ballast, wood, stones, grass, iron, copper, gold, lime, or, in fact, any other substance equally hard, indigestible, and deleterious. The powers of digestion in this bird are certainly very great, but their operation is confined to matters of an alimentary character. But copper, far from being converted into nutriment, acts upon its stomach like poison, and nails very frequently pierce its coats and membranes. Vaillant mentions that one of these birds died in consequence of having devoured an immense quantity of quick lime.’
Note to Chapter 22 ‘That the Ostrich digesteth iron’, Pseudodoxia Epidemica(Vulgar Errors), Sir Thomas Browne’s Works, 1835, Vol II, p495.
Anatomical study of the brain of the African ostrich
Kemei PENG, Yueping FENG, Gaoying ZHANG, Huazhen LIU, Hui SONG
Department of Anatomy, Histology, and Embryology, College of Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine, Huazhong Agricultural University Wuhan 430070 - P.R. CHINA
Received: 23.06.2008
Abstract:
The anatomical characteristics of the African ostrich brain were investigated in this study. The average weight, length, and width of the total brain are 26.34 g, 59.26 mm, and 42.30 mm, respectively. The cerebellum appears relatively well developed and obviously protrudes dorsally. The posterior superior part of the cerebellar vermis almost forms an angle of 130°. The ostrich brain has many more transverse fissures of the cerebellar vermis than do the brains of domestic fowls. Therefore, the surface area of the African ostrich’s cerebellum is larger. The formation of the cerebrum is an obtuse triangle. Its surface is smooth, without any gyrus or sulcus. The gray matter is very thin. There is an arcuated telencephalic vallecula on the dorsal surface, and the sagittal eminence is elliptic. The olfactory bulbs are quite small. The hypophysis is spherical. The whole brain represents only 0.015% of the total body weight, and it is 17 times lighter than the brain of domestic fowls. Statistical analysis showed that the ratio of brain weight to body weight is significantly smaller (P < 0.01) in the African ostrich than in the 3 domestic fowls investigated. The present study suggests that the brain of the African ostrich is underdeveloped.
10 or 11 August 1840: the vault at St Peter Mancroft was accidentally broken open, during the burial of the incumbent vicar’s wife. It was left open 4 days. Stolen were the skull, a few locks of hair and the lead coffin plate. Implicated were George Potter, sexton, who sold the skull to Dr Lubbock, who bequeathed it to the Norwich Hospital Museum, 1845, where it remained until 1922.
Browne’s bones were, as he put it in Hydriotaphia, Urn Buriall, ‘knaved out of his own grave.’
A plaster cast of the skull was made in 1840.
Arthur Keith, Conservator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, was asked by Norfolk and Norwich Hospital to make ‘an exact and permanent record of the skull’s form and features’.
Casts were made of the skull and cranial cavity in 1922. Miriam Tildesley, research worker at the Royal College of Surgeons, made a craniological study in 1923, proving the skull against available images. Arthur Keith handed over to Miriam Tildesley the preparation of the report, which she published in Biometrika Vol XV 1923
According toArthur Keith, Sir Thomas Browne believed that the ‘examination of the skull gives conjecture of principal faculties’. In fact in Religio Medicihe implies that all one needed to know could be found in the self.
‘I could never content my contemplation with those general pieces of wonder, the flux and reflux of the sea, the increase of Nile, the conversion of the needle to the north; and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of nature which, without farther travel, I can do in the cosmography of myself. We carry with us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us. We are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies wisely learns, in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.’
‘There is a secret glome or bottome of our dayes’. (an explanation)
Tildesley proposed:
1) the study of Browne’s skull will further knowledge in the field of racial chronology (the attempts “to measure the degree to which various racial characteristics in the mental and physical domains tend to be associated together”)
2) her work will help demonstrate the degree to which cranial study can offer particularised knowledge about a given individual – ‘to what extent do various mental and physical characters tend to be associated together in the individual? Can the body really tell us anything about the mind of an individual, and if so, how much?’
With particular regard to the creative mind Tildesley’s thesis wants to examine the idea that authors’ texts ‘figure or embody their authors’ .
The problem is the shape of Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, how such a low brow could belong to such a mind. Could Browne’s skull be used to test this?
The low brow is the problem: ‘this not very flattering characteristic’.
‘This outstanding peculiarity if the skull, emphasized also in the endocrinal cast, seems to suggest a defect of marked development in that part of the brain intimately correlated with powers of concentration and discrimination’.
But given the quality of Browne’s writing, and in this case the anomaly between high-brow intellect as evidenced by a body of work, and low-brow physical structure as evidenced by a proven skull (she compares it against all available portraits) -
‘the correlation of superficial head and brain characters with mentality is so low as to provide no thesis for any prognosis of value.’
And if it does not work in such a startlingly anomolous case, can it ever work?
She eventually accepts that there is no link between a low brow and low-brow thinking. ‘For those who have difficulty associating the low forehead of Browne with the high intellectual capacity he evidences, I suggest that it is their previously conceived ideas on this subject which need revision; a high brow does not invariably denote intelligence nor is it a necessary condition of the same.’
Arthur Keith responds:
Phrenological Studies of the Skull and Brain cast of Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich
A Lecture delivered at the University of Edinburgh, 9 May 1924, by Sir Arthur Keith
‘in Religio Medici, a small but great book, … we may see that his brain had been fitted out [a priori?] with faculties of an altogether exceptional kind’
And remembering that for Arthur Keith Browne is no less than a proto-phrenologist: ‘We are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies wisely learns, in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.’
Stating that Sir Thomas Browne believed that the ‘examination of the skull gives conjecture of principal faculties’, Keith believes that “we should see in his skull and in the conformation of the chamber which his brain occupied for 77 years some sure signs of the altogether peculiar powers of his mind.”
Browne ‘lends himself to the phrenologist with promise’.
Keith intends to ‘make the skull of Sir Thomas Browne the text from which I might preach a sermon concerning the forces which mould the skull and brain into their several forms’.
He is conducting ‘a search for a solid basis of fact on which a scientific phrenology might be built up.’ His desire to highlight phrenology is such that he ascribes the theft of the skull 80 years earlier to the phrenological drive: ‘In 1840, the crypt was opened, the skull extracted so that a phrenological study might be made of it.’
‘The brain itself in which this strange mosaic of faculties was built up, has long since gone the way of all flesh, but from its bony husk we may yet learn much concerning its architecture and its configuration – and incidentally, something of its owner.
The shape of Sir Thomas Browne’s skull would imply a skill in languages, and a contemplative nature. Keith sees Browne as ‘a spectator of life rather than a man of action’, ‘a product of high civilisation’, who nevertheless ‘retained all the credulity which characterizes the brain of primitive races of man’.
Browne: ‘[I have] an extravagant and irregular head.’
Keith clearly sees the anomalies of phrenology. ‘I thought nature had dealt rather meanly by myself as regards size and form of head, and I could not help envying her liberality in this respect towards some of my class-fellows and rivals. One particular form of head which was not uncommon at Aberdeen University in those days, and still is, held a high place in my esteem; it was particularly common amongst students from the Highlands. This head was long, with flat sides; it was evenly balanced on the neck, the occiput projecting well backwards, while the forehead was square and upright.’
Browne’s skull’s frontal region is ‘low and receding’, corresponding with the three original portraits. ‘A visitor, on examining the specimen, exclaimed that he would rather ascribe the skull to a flat-headed Indian than a genius like Sir Thomas Browne.’
Keith’s theory proposes that various parts of the brain ‘unfold’ and ‘expand’ in different directions inside people’s heads. STB’s head extended backwards.
Cranial capacity:
Robert the Bruce - 1540cc (60cc above (presumably male) average)
Robert Burns – 1680cc
Jonathan Swift – 1530cc
Sir Thomas Browne – 1520cc
Swift’s brain extends upwards, and Browne’s to the rear. For Burns, the size can be explained only by ‘the intensity with which all emotions – all those primitive functions which have come down to us from animal ancestry – are felt, realized and enjoyed.’
‘One must infer that the brain is an emotional as well as an intellectual organ’ (comparing Burns to Swift).
New hormonal investigations had proposed the pathology of Acromegaly, new bone being laid down alongside existing bone, which changed the outward shape, without altering the shape within.
Keith on Browne’s brain – ‘there are no exceptional protuberances in the shape of the brain to indicate pre-eminence in mans higher faculties.’
Perhaps Browne, for all his theorising and serendipity, was a less than rigorous thinker:
Edmund Gosse accused him of being ‘content to play among the fragments of the medieval system’. He could be accused of being unsystemati and Protean, an observer, but not a deducer. Kenelm Digby criticised his ‘aeryness’.
Keith reverts to his belief in phrenology: ‘the human brain has certainly been evolved along physiological lines – therefore phrenological science is inevitable.’
He can deal with Browne’s brain shape as follows:
Browne’s brain grew into the shape it did as a result of ‘living forces which exert their pressure from within’. Thus it grew to expand at the back and sides. This dynamic caused ‘the brain to expand to an unusual extent in a backward direction and to give a receding aspect to this forehead. We shall see that it also caused the sides of the skull to bulge. Thus the brain of Sir Thomas Browne was forced into a curious and unusual shape.’
Arthur Keith would not, could not, relinquish the association between a low brow and limited intellect – perhaps he never forgave providence for not giving him a tall narrow Highland head. Brain capacity being clearly differentiated proposed a relationship between shape, capacity and mental activity in terms of quantity – quantity of emotion and reason. Only thus could the comparisons between Thomas Browne, Jonathan Swift, Robert Burns and Robert the Bruce be explained.
There is an anomoly in Keith’s thinking: Browne’s skull was supposedly forced to change shape by the growth of the brain. But ‘the brain of STB was forced into a curious and unusual shape.’
‘But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried?’ Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici, his first published work.
In 1893 the board of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital decided after ‘a prolonged and careful consideration of all the circumstances’ to deny the request of the vicar of St Peter Mancroft to return Sir Thomas’s skull. They decided that ‘as there is no legal title to, or property in, any such relic, so there can be no question that this and all other specimens in the Hospital Museum belong inalienably to the Governors.’
After complaints from the staff of St Peter Mancroft & the local press (which used quotations from Hydriotaphia against the horrid abuses that might befall one’s bones)it was decided that Sir Thomas Browne’s skull should be re-inhumed.
The term ‘Sir Thomas Browne’s’ carries an implication of possession, a possession of the body beyond the end of life. Could he be said to be able to possess any part of his body when he no longer existed, and if not what was the relation of this disconnected cranium to the entity - Sir Thomas Browne?
I have eaten brain (calf, and rabbit), in Spain, where they say the meat ‘sabe a ideas’ (tastes of ideas).
On 4 July 1922 the skull was re-inhumed, the head going under the ground, ostrich-like. Its age was entered in the church register, without a trace of irony, as 317 years.
‘We are all monsters, that is, a Composition of Man and Beast.’ Religio Medici
