Brown's Vulgar Errours.
Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths (1646), commonly known as Vulgar Errours, was an important text in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Browne, like Francis Bacon, argued that empirical evidence was necessary to support (or disprove) claims, so his "trial" here likely involved many bird dissections.
Browne is credited with introducing a number of words to the scientific discourse, including "electricity" and--interesting for our purposes--"computer" and "hallucination."
