Letter 2532

Blair sends ‘Absynthia maritman’ from the coast. He recommends the bearer, Philip Miller, a gardener and gifted botanist. Blair hopes Sloane will consider Miller a candidate for the position of ‘Gardener to the Chelsea Garden’. He asks that Sloane present the enclosed to the Royal Society and informs him he is going to write an ‘account of a small fish calld the Pitleback’. Patrick Blair was a botanist and surgeon whose papers were published in the Transactions. In 1715 Blair joined the Jacobite rebellion as a battle surgeon but was captured and condemned to death. He was visited by Sloane in prison in the hopes the latter might secure a pardon. Sloane was successful and the pardon arrived shortly before Blair’s scheduled execution (Anita Guerrini, Blair, Patrick (c.16801728), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2568, accessed 31 May 2011]).