Letter 0387

Ray received Sloane’s letters and ‘the Box containing your draughts & descriptions of Birds’ last Monday. He cannot comment on them ’till I received the Synonyma you mentioned’. Ray discusses his apprehension that there are several species of waterfowl ‘common to Europe and America’. He admires Sloane’s industrious collecting and thanks him for offering to send the catalogue of Jamaican plants. He declines to accept the catalogue because his new book ‘meddle[s] not with American & Indian plants’. Ray was a theologian and naturalist who collected and catalogued his botanical findings in the much lauded Historia plantarum (1686, 1688) (Scott Mandelbrote, Ray , John (16271705), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2005 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23203, accessed 18 June 2013]).