Letter 3555

Desaguliers was to wait on Sloane to tell him something, but became ill and could not make it. He asks the carrier to ‘settle my last Years salary in the next Council, which us’d to be done generally at the meeting of the Society after the Vacation, tho now the Death of the Treasurer hinder’d it.’ Desaguliers is having financial troubles and needs the money. The carrier is also to relay a message ‘I told you by word of mouth’. Desaguliers was the son of French Huguenots who quit France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). He was a natural philosopher and engineer, became Sir Isaac Newton’s pupil, was a proponent of Newtonianism, and performed lectures and experiments at the Royal Society (Patricia Fara, Desaguliers, John Theophilus (16831744), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7539, accessed 12 July 2013]).