Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. DR. THOMAS BROWN AND DR. ERASMUS DARWIN. We have certainly, in the preceding, a long enough digression, the principal purpose of which as it arose was simply to show (with a glance at contemporary philosophy then) what sort of a man, as a philosopher, Thomas Brown was that sent its author his Observations on Dr. IJarwin's Zoonomia. But Brown was not exactly then the great Dr. Brown whom we have just portrayed. No; Brown, doubtless, might always have been righteously called expatiating Brown; but, at the age of eighteen, when he wrote his Observations, he must have been expatiatiou itself. At that age he belonged to a select circle of warm-hearted, warm-headed boys that, nightly, took counsel over their tea-cups for the benefit of the human race. Young men of an Edinburgh mutual improvement society that write, and read, and debate over tea the greater part of the night—such young men cannot choose but expatiate. And it is just for such quality that no one can look into the Lectures of Dr. Thomas Brown without being struck with admiration at the structure of their every paragraph. Clause after clause—how happily they dovetail—how happily they tit into each other — each falling so neatly, naturally, into a place that just seems made for it. They are, extemporaneous, these Lectures : their author has just gothis Chair, and they have to be made. They are seen (or heard) to rise, ever, as it were, with a certain hollow swell: but they always overbrow failure, and even exact, suddenly at times, an involuntary praise. Now, as was the writing of Dr. Thomas Brown, so was his speech. It was nothing if not refined. His biographer expressly states, " Dr. Brown's conversational style was not less correct than his written discourse;" and " even from the time he was a boy, Dr. ...