Letter 1090

Mrs Ray sends her thanks, but she still thinks Mr Bateman’s offer is too low. Dale asks Sloane and his friends to give their opinion so as to convince her to sell her late husband’s collection. He inquires after Mr Willougby and asks whether it is time to publishes Ray’s ‘History of Insects’. Dale hopes that Sloane ‘put names to those Jamaican Plants I left with Mr Petiver’. He wonders what ‘progress you have made in the Monuments for Mr Ray’. 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]).