Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Or, Enquiries Into Very many received Tenents, And commonly presumed Truths. by BROWNE ([Sir] Thomas) - 1646

By Thomas Browne Dr. of Physick. London, Printed by T.H. for Edward Dod, and are To be sold in Ivie Lane, 1646. F’cap folio (so watermarked); license leaf present, but without the final blank; text printed within line border throughout; large historiated initial on A3, woodcut initials elsewhere, and head-pieces of type ornaments; pp.[xx (not paginated)]+386; a⁶, b, A - T, V, X - Z, Aa - Ii, Kk - Tt, Vv, Xx - Zz, Aaa⁴, Bbb^{5 (ex 6)}; nineteenth century polished calf ruled gilt, tooled blind, at borders, gilt tooled edges, neatly re-backed with matching calf, ruled and tooled gilt on spines, red lettering-piece; matching oil-marbled edges and end-papers, the end-papers strengthened with linen at the gutters. Small split in a1 (not touching printed area) unobtrusively strengthened, and small hole in blank upper margin of a2 neatly almost invisibly repaired with matching paper (both being original paper flaws); small hole in T3 due to an original paper flaw, with loss of one letter on each side of the leaf; quarter inch chip to extreme blank lower margin of F3; otherwise an excellent, clean, copy with good margins. Wing, B5159; Grolier 107; Wellcome II, p.253; Keynes [73B]; NCBEL, I, 2230. There is an alternative 1646 imprint [73A] with the printer’s name in full and with no address, which Keynes reports as ‘less usual’ and ‘likely to be the earlier’. The rest of the title-page was printed from the same setting, ‘so the change was probably made while the book was in the press.’ The present copy has the wrong catchword on A6v (‘THE’ instead of ‘A’) and p.317 misnumbered 217, apparently as always. The first edition of Browne’s most famous and substantial work in which he applies his brilliant scientific mind to a wealth of common misconceptions, at the same time providing a fascinating account of popular superstition and tradition. The book, which came to be known as Browne’s ‘Vulgar Errors’, was the result of many years of experimental investigation, and, written in an extravagant style described by Johnson in his Life as “a tissue of many languages; a mixture of heterogeneous words, brought together from distant regions, with terms appropriated to one art, and drawn by violence into the sevice of another”, it also provides for the modern reader an “inexhaustible store of entertainment” - (D.N.B.). Browne’s complaint against the science of the day was that it turned its back on nature and relied on tradition. ‘Intellectual acquisition’, he wrote in his introductory address To the Reader, ‘is but a reminiscential evocation, and new impressions but the colouring of old stamps which stood pale in the soul before.’ He addressed his accusations of ‘vulgar error’, not to the ignorant, but ‘the knowing and leading part of Learning’ with the hope that he might awaken an intellectual conscience in them. All books listed by Robert Temple are first editions unless otherwise stated.