Letter 1055

Morton is still waiting for an account of the elephant’s skeleton and the Philosophical Transactions he was promised. He has drawn up a paper on land and river shells in Northamptonshire and the natural history of the region more generally. He hopes it will be published in the Philosophical Transactions. Morton has not reviewed Hooke’s posthumous works. 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]).