Letter 1868

Morton has been rather busy the last three weeks putting his collection together for Sloane’s use. He will send what he can, including a box of fossils. Morton suggests an abstract of his Natural History of Northamptonshire be included in the Philosophical Transactions. He would like to become a member of the Royal Society ‘Whatsoever the charge of it be’. 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]).