Letter 3256

Jones forwards a certificate to Sloane, signed by the Vice-Chancellor and two college heads. Jones does not know Sloane, but informs him the affair is an ‘affront to the Faculty’. He is displeased that ‘any Academical Honours [could be] prostituted to a common Mountebank, who is punishable by the Laws of the Land’. Jones considers the man concerned, who is being granted a degree by ‘Royal Mandate’, a quack. Others at Cambridge feel the same way. He blames the Royal College of Physicians for forcing the university to grant degrees to unqualified candidates. Jones suggests that future cases should be forwarded to the university Senate and Vice-Chancellor for consideration. Henry Jones was a scientific editor. He was a graduate of Eton College and studied at King’s College, Cambridge. In 1716 he graduated BA, gained his MA in 1720, and was elected a Fellow of the College. He edited a two-volume edition of the Philosophical Transactions for the years 1700-1720. Jones was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1723. He died in London, unmarried, in 1727 (Gordon Goodwin, Jones, Henry (c.16951727), rev. Robert Brown, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/15011, accessed 15 Aug 2013]).