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ON THE OSTRICH
The ostrich hath a compounded name in Greek and Latin —Struthio-Camelus, borrowed from a bird and a beast, as being a feathered and biped animal, yet in some ways like a camel; somewhat in the long neck; somewhat in the foot; and, as some imagine, from a camel-like position in the part of generation.
It is accounted the largest and tallest of any winged and feathered fowl; taller than the gruen or cassowary. This ostrich, though a female, was about seven feet high, and some of the males were higher, either exceeding or answerable unto the stature of the great porter unto king Charles the First. The weight was a370 [] in grocer’s scales.
Whosoever shall compare or consider together the ostrich and the tomineio, or humbird, not weighing twelve grains, may easily discover under what compass or latitude the creation of birds hath been ordained.
The head is not large, but little in proportion to the whole body. And, therefore, Julius Scaliger, when he mentioned birds of large heads (comparatively unto their bodies), named the sparrow, the owl, and the woodpecker; and, reckoning up birds of small heads, instanceth in the hen, the peacock, and the ostrich.
The head is looked upon by discerning spectators to resemble that of a goose rather than any kind of στροῦθος, or passer: and so may be more properly called cheno-camelus, or ansero-camelus.
There is a handsome figure of an ostrich in Mr. Willoughby’s and Ray’s Ornithologia: another in Aldrovandus and Jonstonus, and Bellonius; but the heads not exactly agreeing. ‘Rostrum habet exiguum, sed acutum,’ saith Jonstoun; ‘un long bec et poinctu,’ saith Bellonius; men describing such as they have an opportunity to see, and perhaps some the ostriches of very different countries, wherein, as in some other birds, there may be some variety.
In Africa, where some eat elephants, it is no wonder that some also feed upon ostriches. They flay them with their feathers on, which they sell, and eat the flesh. But Galen and physicians have condemned that flesh, as hard and indigestible. The emperor Heliogabalus had a fancy for the brains, when he brought six hundred ostriches’ heads to one supper, only for the brains’ sake; yet Leo Africanus saith that he ate of young ostriches among the Numidians with a good gust; and, perhaps, boiled, and well cooked, after the art of Apicius, with peppermint, dates, and other good things, they might go down with some stomachs.
I do not find that the strongest eagles, or best-spirited hawks, will offer at these birds; yet, if there were such gyrfalcons as Julius Scaliger saith the duke of Savoy and Henry, king of Navarre, had, it is like they would strike at them, and, making at the head, would spoil them, or so disable them, that they might be taken.
If these had been brought over in June, it is, perhaps, likely we might have met with eggs in some of their bellies, whereof they lay very many: but they are the worst of eggs for food, yet serviceable unto many other uses in their country; for, being cut transversely, they serve for drinking cups and skull-caps; and, as I have seen, there are large circles of them, and some painted and gilded, which hang up in Turkish mosques, and also in Greek churches. They are preserved with us for rarities; and, as they come to be common, some use will be found of them in physic, even as of other eggshells and other such substances.
When it first came into my garden, it soon ate up all the gilliflowers, tulip-leaves, and fed greedily upon what was green, as lettuce, endive, sorrell; it would feed on oats, barley, peas, beans; swallow onions; eat sheep’s lights and livers. – Then you mention what you know more.
When it took down a large onion, it stuck awhile in the gullet, and did not descend directly, but wound backward behind the neck; whereby I might perceive that the gullet turned much; but this is not peculiar unto the ostrich; but the same hath been observed in the stork, when it swallows down frogs and pretty big bits.
It made sometimes a strange noise; had a very odd note, especially in the morning, and, perhaps, when hungry.
According to Aldrovandus, some hold that there is an antipathy between it and a horse, which an ostrich will not endure to see or be near; but, while I kept it, I could not confirm this opinion; which might, perhaps, be raised because a common way of hunting and taking them is by swift horses.
It is much that Cardanus should be mistaken with a great part of men, that the coloured and dyed feathers of ostriches were natural; as red, blue, yellow, and green; whereas, the natural colours in this bird were white and greyish. Of the fashion of wearing feathers in battles or wars by men, and women, see Scaliger, Contra Cardan. Exercitat. 220.
If wearing of feather-fans should come up again, it might much increase the trade of plumage from Barbary. Bellonius saith he saw two hundred skins with the feathers on in one shop of Alexandria.
BOULIMIA CENTENARIA
There is a woman now living in Yarmouth, named Elizabeth Michell, an hundred and two years old; a person of four feet and half high, very lean, very poor, and living in a mean room with pitiful accommodation. She had a son after she was past fifty. Though she answers well enough unto ordinary questions, yet she apprehends her eldest daughter to be her mother; but what is most remarkable concerning her is a kind of boulimia or dog-appetite; she greedily eating day and night what her allowance, friends, and charitable persons afford her, drinking beer or water, and making little distinction or refusal of any food, either of broths, flesh, fish, apples, pears, and any coarse food, which she eateth in no small quantity, insomuch that the overseers of the poor have of late been fain to augment her weekly allowance. She sleeps indifferently well, till hunger awakes her; then she must have no ordinary supply whether in the day or night. She vomits not, nor is very laxative. This is the oldest example of the sal esurinum chymicorum, which I have taken notice of; though I am ready to afford my charity unto her, yet I should be loth to spend a piece of ambergris I have upon her, and to allow six grains to every dose till I found some effect in moderating her appetite: though that be esteemed a great specific in her condition.
UPON THE DARK THICK MIST HAPPENING ON THE 27TH OF NOVEMBER, 1674
Though it be not strange to see frequent mists, clouds, and rains, in England, as many ancient describers of this country have noted, yet I could not but take notice of a very great mist which happened upon the 27th of the last November, and from thence have taken this occasion to propose something of mists, clouds, and rains, unto your candid considerations.
Herein mists may well deserve the first place, as being, if not the first in nature, yet the first meteor mentioned in Scripture, and soon after the creation, for it is said, Gen. ii. that ‘God had not yet caused it to rain upon the earth, but a mist went up from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground,’ for it might take a longer time for the elevation of vapours sufficient to make a congregation of clouds able to afford any store of showers and rain in so early days of the world.
Thick vapours, not ascending high but hanging about the earth and covering the surface of it, are commonly called mists; if they ascend high they are called clouds. They remain upon the earth till they either fall down or are attenuated, rarified, and scattered.
The great mist was not only observable about London, but in remote parts of England, and as we hear, in Holland, so that it was of larger extent than mists are commonly apprehended to be; most men conceiving that they reach not much beyond the places where they behold them. Mists make an obscure air, but they beget not darkness, for the atoms and particles thereof admit the light, but if the matter thereof be very thick, close, and condensed, the mist grows considerably obscure and like a cloud, so the miraculous and palpable darkness of Egypt is conceived to have been effected by an extraordinary dense and dark mist or a kind of cloud spread over the land of Egypt, and also miraculously restrained from the neighbour land of Goshen.
Mists and fogs, containing commonly vegetable spirits, when they dissolve and return upon the earth, may fecundate and add some fertility unto it, but they may be more unwholesome in great cities than in country habitations: for they consist of vapours not only elevated from simple watery and humid places, but also the exhalations of draughts, common sewers, and fœtid places, and decoctions used by unwholesome and sordid manufactures: and also hindering the sea-coal smoke from ascending and passing away, it is conjoined with the mist and drawn in by the breath, all which may produce bad effects, inquinate the blood, and produce catarrhs and coughs. Sereins, well known in hot countries, cause headache, toothache, and swelled faces; but they seem to have their original from subtle, invisible, nitrous, and piercing exhalations, caused by a strong heat of the sun, which falling after sunset produce the effects mentioned.
There may be also subterraneous mists, when heat in the bowels of the earth, working upon humid parts, makes an attenuation thereof and consequently nebulous bodies in the cavities of it.
There is a kind of a continued mist in the bodies of animals, especially in the cavous parts, as may be observed in bodies opened presently after death, and some think that in sleep there is a kind of mist in the brain; and upon exceeding motion some animals cast out a mist about them.
When the cuttle fish, polypus, or loligo, make themselves invisible by obscuring the water about them; they do it not by any vaporous emission, but by a black humour ejected, which makes the water black and dark near them: but upon excessive motion some animals are able to afford a mist about them, when the air is cool and fit to condense it, as horses after a race, so that they become scarce visible.
ACCOUNT OF A THUNDER STORM AT NORWICH, 1665
June 28, 1665.
After seven o’clock in the evening there was almost a continued thunder until eight, wherein the tonitru and fulgur, the noise and lightning, were so terrible, that they put the whole city into an amazement, and most unto their prayers. The clouds went low, and the cracks seemed near over our heads during the most part of the thunder. About eight o’clock, an ignis fulmineus, pila ignea fulminans, telum igneum fulmineum, or fire-ball, hit against the little wooden pinnacle of the high leucome window of my house, toward the market-place, broke the flue boards, and carried pieces thereof a stone’s cast off; whereupon many of the tiles fell into the street, and the windows in adjoining houses were broken. At the same time either a part of that close-bound fire, or another of the same nature, fell into the court-yard, and whereof no notice was taken till we began to examine the house, and then we found a freestone on the outside of the wall of the entry leading to the kitchen, half a foot from the ground, fallen from the wall; a hole as big as a foot-ball bored through the wall, which is about a foot thick, and a chest which stood against it, on the inside, split and carried about a foot from the wall. The wall also, behind the leaden cistern, at five yards distance from it, broken on the inside and outside; the middle seeming entire. The lead on the edges of the cistern turned a little up; and a great washing-bowl, that stood by it, to recover the rain, turned upside down, and split quite through. Some chimneys and tiles were struck down in other parts of the city. A fire-ball also struck down the wall in the market-place. And all this, God be thanked! without mischief unto any person. The greatest terror was from the noise, answerable unto two or three cannon. The smell it left was strong, like that after the discharge of a cannon. The balls that flew were not like fire in the flame, but the coal; and the people said it was like the sun. It was discutiens, terebrans, but not urens. It burnt nothing, nor any thing it touched smelt of fire; nor melted any lead of window or cistern, as I found it do in the great storm, about nine years ago, at Melton-hall, four miles off, at that time when the hail broke three thousand pounds worth of glass in Norwich, in half-a-quarter of an hour. About four days after, the like fulminous fire killed a man in Erpingham church, by Aylsham, upon whom it broke, and beat down divers which were within the wind of it. One also went off in Sir John Hobart’s gallery, at Blickling. He was so near that his arm and thigh were numbed about an hour after. Two or three days after, a woman and horse were killed near Bungay; her hat so shivered that no piece remained bigger than a groat, whereof I had some pieces sent unto me. Granades, crackers, and squibs, do much resemble the discharge, and aurum fulminans the fury thereof. Of other thunderbolts or lapides fulminei, I have little opinion. Some I have by me under that name, but they are è genere fossilium.
Thomas Browne.
Norwich, 1665.
ON DREAMS
Half our days we pass in the shadow of the earth; and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives. A good part of our sleep is peered out with visions and fantastical objects, wherein we are confessedly deceived. The day supplieth us with truths; the night with fictions and falsehoods, which uncomfortably divide the natural account of our beings. And, therefore, having passed the day in sober labours and rational enquiries of truth, we are fain to betake ourselves unto such a state of being, wherein the soberest heads have acted all the monstrosities of melancholy, and which unto open eyes are no better than folly and madness.
Happy are they that go to bed with grand music, like Pythagoras, or have ways to compose the fantastical spirit, whose unruly wanderings take off inward sleep, filling our heads with St. Anthony’s quo;s visions, and the dreams of Lipara in the sober chambers of rest.
Virtuous thoughts of the day lay up good treasures for the night; whereby the impressions of imaginary forms arise into sober similitudes, acceptable unto our slumbering selves and preparatory unto divine impressions. Hereby Solomon’s sleep was happy. Thus prepared, Jacob might well dream of angels upon a pillow of stone. And the best sleep of Adam might be the best of any after.
That there should be divine dreams seems unreasonably doubted by Aristotle. That there are demoniacal dreams we have little reason to doubt. Why may there not be angelical? If there be guardian spirits, they may not be inactively about us in sleep; but may sometimes order our dreams: and many strange hints, instigations, or discourses, which are so amazing unto us, may arise from such foundations.
But the phantasms of sleep do commonly walk in the great road of natural and animal dreams, wherein the thoughts or actions of the day are acted over and echoed in the night. Who can therefore wonder that Chrysostom should dream of St. Paul, who daily read his epistles; or that Cardan, whose head was so taken up about the stars, should dream that his soul was in the moon! Pious persons, whose thoughts are daily busied about heaven, and the blessed state thereof, can hardly escape the nightly phantasms of it, which though sometimes taken for illuminations, or divine dreams, yet rightly perpended may prove but animal visions, and natural night-scenes of their awaking contemplations.
Many dreams are made out by sagacious exposition, and from the signature of their subjects; carrying their interpretation in their fundamental sense and mystery of similitude, whereby, he that understands upon what natural fundamental every notion dependeth, may, by symbolical adaptation, hold a ready way to read the characters of Morpheus. In dreams of such a nature, Artemidorus, Achmet, and Astrampsichus, from Greek, Egyptian, and Arabian oneirocriticism, may hint some interpretation: who, while we read of a ladder in Jacob’s dream, will tell us that ladders and scalary ascents signify preferment; and while we consider the dream of Pharaoh, do teach us that rivers overflowing speak plenty, lean oxen, famine and scarcity; and therefore it was but reasonable in Pharaoh to demand the interpretation from his magicians, who, being Egyptians, should have been well versed in symbols and the hieroglyphical notions of things. The greatest tyrant in such divinations was Nabuchodonosor, while, besides the interpretation, he demanded the dream itself; which being probably determined by divine immission, might escape the common road of phantasms, that might have been traced by Satan.
When Alexander, going to besiege Tyre, dreamt of a Satyr, it was no hard exposition for a Grecian to say, ‘Tyre will be thine.’ He that dreamed that he saw his father washed by Jupiter and anointed by the sun, had cause to fear that he might be crucified, whereby his body would be washed by the rain, and drop by the heat of the sun. The dream of Vespasian was of harder exposition; as also that of the emperor Mauritius, concerning his successor Phocas. And a man might have been hard put to it, to interpret the language of Æsculapius, when to a consumptive person he held forth his fingers; implying thereby that his cure lay in dates, from the homonomy of the Greek, which signifies dates and fingers.
We owe unto dreams that Galen was a physician, Dion an historian, and that the world hath seen some notable pieces of Cardan; yet, he that should order his affairs by dreams, or make the night a rule unto the day, might be ridiculously deluded; wherein Cicero is much to be pitied, who having excellently discoursed of the vanity of dreams, was yet undone by the flattery of his own, which urged him to apply himself unto Augustus.
However dreams may be fallacious concerning outward events, yet may they be truly significant at home; and whereby we may more sensibly understand ourselves. Men act in sleep with some conformity unto their awaked senses; and consolations or discouragements may be drawn from dreams which intimately tell us ourselves. Luther was not like to fear a spirit in the night, when such an apparition would not terrify him in the day. Alexander would hardly have run away in the sharpest combats of sleep, nor Demosthenes have stood stoutly to it, who was scarce able to do it in his prepared senses. Persons of radical integrity will not easily be perverted in their dreams, nor noble minds do pitiful things in sleep. Crassus would have hardly been bountiful in a dream, whose fist was so close awake. But a man might have lived all his life upon the sleeping hand of Antonius.
There is an art to make dreams, as well as their interpretation; and physicians will tell us that some food makes turbulent, some gives quiet, dreams. Cato, who doated upon cabbage, might find the crude effects thereof in his sleep; wherein the Egyptians might find some advantage by their superstitious abstinence from onions. Pythagoras might have calmer sleeps, if he totally abstained from beans. Even Daniel, the great interpreter of dreams, in his leguminous diet, seems to have chosen no advantageous food for quiet sleeps, according to Grecian physic.
To add unto the delusion of dreams, the fantastical objects seem greater than they are; and being beheld in the vaporous state of sleep, enlarge their diameters unto us; whereby it may prove more easy to dream of giants than pigmies. Democritus might seldom dream of atoms, who so often thought of them. He almost might dream himself a bubble extending unto the eighth sphere. A little water makes a sea; a small puff of wind a tempest. A grain of sulphur kindled in the blood may make a flame like Ætna; and a small spark in the bowels of Olympias a lightning over all the chamber.
But, beside these innocent delusions, there is a sinful state of dreams. Death alone, not sleep, is able to put an end unto sin; and there may be a night-book of our iniquities; for beside the transgressions of the day, casuists will tell us of mortal sins in dreams, arising from evil precogitations; meanwhile human law regards not noctambulos; and if a night-walker should break his neck, or kill a man, takes no notice of it.
Dionysius was absurdly tyrannical to kill a man for dreaming that he had killed him; and really to take away his life, who had but fantastically taken away his. Lamia was ridiculously unjust to sue a young man for a reward, who had confessed that pleasure from her in a dream which she had denied unto his awaking senses: conceiving that she had merited somewhat from his fantastical fruition and shadow of herself. If there be such debts, we owe deeply unto sympathies; but the common spirit of the world must be ready in such arrearages.
If some have swooned, they may also have died in dreams, since death is but a confirmed swooning. Whether Plato died in a dream, as some deliver, he must rise again to inform us. That some have never dreamed, is as improbable as that some have never laughed. That children dream not the first half-year; that men dream not in some countries, with many more, are unto me sick men’s dreams; dreams out of the ivory gate, and visions before midnight.
