THREE CENTURIES' PERSPECTIVES 395
hood; it is a matter very considerable, and could they be smelled
out, would much advantage, not only the Church of Christ, but also
the Coffers of Princes."
Turning to arguments from reason, foul odors might arise
among groups of people from unhealthy habits of diet or hygiene.
But Jewish dietary laws guarantee moderation and good sense,
while drinking habits tend to abstemiousness—"seldom offending
in ebriety or excess of drink, nor erring in gulosity or superfluity of
meats; whereby they prevent indigestion and crudities, and conse-
quently putrescence of humors."
If no reason can therefore be found in Jewish habits of life, the
only conceivable rationale for a noxious racial odor would lie in a
divine "curse derived upon them by Christ... as a badge or brand
of a generation that crucified their Salvator." But Browne rejects
this proposal even more forcefully as a "conceit without all warrant;
and an easie way to take off dispute in what point of obscurity so-
ever." The invocation of miraculous agency, when no natural expla-
nation can be found, is a coward's or lazy man's escape from failure.
(Browne does not object to heavenly intervention for truly great
events like Noah's flood or the parting of the Red Sea, but a reliance
upon miracles for small items, like the putative racial odor of un-
fairly stigmatized people, makes a mockery of divine grandeur.
Browne then heaps similar ridicule on the legend that Ireland has
no snakes because St. Patrick cast them out with his rod. Such inap-
propriate claims for a myriad of minor miracles only stifles discus-
sion about the nature of phenomena and the workings of genuine
causes.)
But Browne then caps his case against the proposition "that Jews
stink" with an even stronger argument based on reason. The entire
subject, he argues, makes no sense because the category in ques-
tion—the Jewish people—does not represent the kind of entity that
could bear such properties as a distinctive national odor.
Among the major fallacies of human reason, such "category mis-
takes" are especially common in the identification of groups and
the definition of their characters—problems of special concern to
taxonomists like myself. Much of Browne's text is archaic, and
strangely fascinating therefore as a kind of conceptual fossil. But his
struggle with errors of categories in debunking the proposition
"that Jews stink" interleaves a layer of modern relevance, and un-