Letter 0373

Dale asks Smith to pass 6 botanical queries on to Sloane. Smith requests Sloane provide his answers ‘wth w’t convenient speed you can’. Samuel Dale was an apothecary, botanist, and physician who contributed several articles to the Philosophical Transactions. He was John Ray’s executor and good friend, and from Dale’s letters to Sloane we learn many details of Ray’s final moments (G. S. Boulger, Dale, Samuel (bap. 1659, d. 1739), rev. Juanita Burnby, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7016, accessed 5 July 2013]). Samuel Smith apprenticed to the book trade in 1675 and was indentured to the bookseller Samuel Gellibrand followed by Moses Pitt. Smith joined the Stationers Company and became freeman of the company and then freeman of the city of London in 1682. Smith published the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions from the beginning of his career and he and his partner Benjamin Walford were officially named ‘printers to the Royal Society’ in 1693 (Marja Smolenaars, Ann Veenhoff, Smith, Samuel (bap. 1658, d. 1707), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/63289, accessed 27 June 2013]).