I could be content that we might procreate like trees

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I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that we were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition; it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life.

Thomas Browne
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4 thoughts on “I could be content that we might procreate like trees”

    • His quote is sufficiently weird that I had to know what prompted it. That mystery remains unsolved. But in looking him up I learned he was married and had 10 kids, six of whom died in infancy. A tragedy not remarkable for someone who lived back in the 1600s.

      However, Wikipedia says this about him:

      Browne appears at No. 69 in the Oxford English Dictionary’s list of top cited sources. He has 775 entries in the OED of first usage of a word, is quoted in a total of 4131 entries of first evidence of a word, and is quoted 1596 times as first evidence of a particular meaning of a word. Examples of his coinages, many of which are of a scientific or medical nature, include ‘ambidextrous’, ‘antediluvian’, ‘analogous’, ‘approximate’, ‘ascetic’, ‘anomalous’, ‘carnivorous’, ‘coexistence’, ‘coma’, ‘compensate’, ‘computer’, ‘cryptography’, ‘cylindrical’, ‘disruption’, ‘ergotisms’, ‘electricity’, ‘exhaustion’, ‘ferocious’, ‘follicle’, ‘generator’, ‘gymnastic’, ‘hallucination’, ‘herbaceous’, ‘holocaust’, ‘insecurity’, ‘indigenous’, ‘jocularity’, ‘literary’, ‘locomotion’, ‘medical’, ‘migrant’, ‘mucous’, ‘prairie’, ‘prostate’, ‘polarity’, ‘precocious’, ‘pubescent’, ‘therapeutic’, ‘suicide’, ‘ulterior’, ‘ultimate’ and ‘veterinarian’.

      So not an incel. But a polymath, a class of personages who are famed for their eccentricities.

      • Ah. Missed that. As an excuse, Wikipedia usually puts such things as marriage and children in the “at a glance” box for biographical entries, not as a single sentence buried down in the “early life” section of the article.

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