Sir Thomas Browne, physician, member of the Royal College of Physicians, and writer of extraordinary prose, was, to borrow William Butler Yeats's phrase, a marker of things "past, or passing, or to come," a writer who sums up more eloquently than almost anyone else of his time received notions in philosophy and religion yet gives a good deal of attention to empirical observation, to the approach to the natural world that would be so significant to later generations. In Religio Medici (The Religion of a Physician, 1642) Browne articulates the nature of his faith in relation to the tradition of Anglican Christianity; in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Vulgar Errors, 1646), by patient examination of authorities and of the evidence, he subjects many of the popular and learned errors of his time to withering skepticism. In the companion pieces Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall, or, A Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk and...