Letter 4162

Du Bois writes to Sloane about a curious bird that was brought form Arabia by one of “our” coffee ships. Its Arabic name is Lohong and it eats any kind of fish or flesh and seems to be an undiscribed bird. Charles du Bois was a botanist working as the cashier-general of the East India Company. He became acquainted with other natural historians like James Petiver, William Sherard and Sloane, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1700 (B. D. Jackson, Dubois, Charles (bap. 1658, d. 1740), rev. P. E. Kell, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8113, accessed 8 July 2013]).