So I hear you folks wanted to hear about some weird ostrich stuff from the 17th Century, eh? Well, settle down and I’ll tell you all about it. 
Weirdly, our tale begins where yesterday’s ended - with TOADS AND PISS. “Of the pissing of toads” is the title of chapter 13 in book 3 of Pseudodoxia Epidemica (or Vulgar Errors), by a bloke called Thomas Browne who was basically the early enlightenment version of Mythbusters.
Browne was a polymath and a proper eccentric, and even celebrated maniac Coleridge thought he was full on bananas. He REALLY loved making up words, and came up with some of the classics, like ‘electricity’, ‘medical’, ‘pathology’, ‘hallucination’, ‘literary’, and ‘computer’.
Pseudodoxia, which he did in 1646, was a _total banger_. Perhaps the most magnificently petty endeavour in the history of science, it was basically a 400-page beasting of absolutely every bit of old huff that people believed about the natural world.
Of course at the time, the scientific method was pretty novel - the way people determined stuff about nature was to read the bible or some old windbag off of ancient greece, then shrug and take it as hard fact. If it was in a big book, they figured it was probably true.
So Browne went at it like a pack of cockneys leaping into a skip full of warm lager, and blew peoples' minds apart. He asked if elephants had joints in their legs (yes), if salamanders were immune to fire (very no), and “if Flyes make that humming noyse by their mouths or wings”.
Back in the 1600s, people were pretty sure that badgers had massively shorter legs on one side of their bodies than the other. Browne didn't really know what to do with this, and basically just spent a whole page saying “yeah… but no.”
But being well into empiricism, Browne loved practical experiments. At one point while writing Pseudodoxia he just stops & wonders ‘Who would win in a fight: a toad or a spider?’, and then just fucking tests it with a series of gladiatorial duels. (The toads TRASHED the spiders).
He hung dead birds in his parlour just to watch them rot, nicked bits of a dead sperm whale off a beach because he was curious about what would happen if he boiled them, and had a house rammed full of skulls, plants and antiquities.
(Browne’s constant poking about with nature resonates with me. One summer as a kid, I put loads of woodlice in a bucket of water to see if they’d evolve into trilobites. After a few grim hours watching them drown, I got really sad and probably learned something about science).
But perhaps Browne’s best experiment was the time he decided to see if ostriches ate metal. Everyone thought they totally did, because Pliny reckoned so, and so we ended up with shit like this image of an ostrich wolfing down a gold bowl with barely concealed glee.
(Something I love, by the way, is that a common name for ostriches at the time was ‘Sparrow Camels’ - which makes total sense to me. But then, I also reckon anteaters should be called ‘elephant badgers’, and bears should be called ‘level 9 weasels’).
So Browne had already debunked the ostrich thing in Pseudodoxia. HOWEVER, in 1681, King Charles II got sent a *shitload* of ostriches he didn’t even want by the king of morocco, and Browne couldn’t resist having a go with one.
So even though he was 77 by then, Browne convinced his son in London to hustle an ostrich off the king, and ended up with it living in his norwich garden, in an episode he would come to refer to (with some regret) as ‘the Oestridge buisinesse’.
('The Oestridge Buisinesse' would also be an amazing name for a group of wrestlers, a dance move, or a sex tape).
Anyway. The ostrich had bugger all interest in eating any of the tempting selection of metals Browne left out for it - but it did guzzle EVERYTHING growing in his garden, to the point where he panicked and started feeding it buckets of meat.
His notes from the time reveal the mind of a man slowly curdling with anxiety at the realisation that an ostrich is the boss of him, and his correspondence with his son gradually transitions from cool, erudite observations to a series of frantic questions about ostrich husbandry.
Eventually the ostrich dropped dead on a cold night, and Browne - probably wiping his brow in relief - got straight in its guts & found gastroliths, thus finally confirming the truth behind pliny’s rubbish. Not long after, Browne himself went to join the ostrich in the afterlife.
And that was the story of THE OESTRIDGE BUISINESSE. Hope you enjoyed it. And if it piqued your interest in Thomas Browne, it just so happens you can find all his work online here, beautifully indexed: penelope.uchicago.edu
