Letter 1754

A collection of antiquities was ‘lately digg’d up at Monks Kirby in Warwick-shire’. Morton describes the nature of the artifacts and connects them to the conversion of Roman Britain to Christianity. He returns the books Sloane lent him and requests the latest Philosophical Transactions. 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]).