Letter 0978

Dale was not able to talk to Mrs Ray, as it was the day of John Ray’s internment. Dale reminds Sloane that, with Ray’s death, the £60 per annum from Willoughby terminates. He tells Sloane that Ray’s papers are all secured, including that regarding his History of Insects. He asks Sloane for one of his Jamaican shells. 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]).