Letter 0919

Morton thanks Sloane for his favours and friendship, offering his service in return. He has been making observations for his History of Northamptonshire and is almost done with the fossil descriptions. He will forward an account of them soon. Morton describes an extraordinary stone taken out of a hog, which he may gift to the Royal Society. 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]).