It was Coleridge who so definitively characterized Sir Thomas Browne as “a hunter of oddities and strangenesses.” There is no key which fits his temper so perfectly. He was, his life long, an indefatigable searcher after what was unusual, in his reading, in his friends' experience, and in his own. Clearly it is this penchant for the exceptional, this probing for the bizarre, the exotic, which accounts for his lively interest in foreign countries, notably those which were least like his own—an interest attested by the fact that so generous a portion of his reading concerned other lands.