Letter 1869

Morton explains that the fossils he was to send did not make it because the carrier failed to come to town. He plans on sending the rest of his collection of specimens from Northamptonshire next week. The collection includes different soils, stones, minerals, and fossils. John Morton was a naturalist who was in correspondence with Sloane from roughly 1703 to 1716. Morton contributed nearly one thousand specimens (fossils, shells, bones, teeth, minerals, rocks, man-made artifacts, etc.) to Sloane’s collection (Yolanda Foote, Morton, John (16711726), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2010 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/19364, accessed 2 July 2013]).