Letter 3981

Locke thanks Sloane for sending ‘news from the commonwealth of letters’. He complains that he too often receives nothing ‘beyond the observation of a scabby sheep or a lame horse’. Sloane told Locke of a woman with an extraordinarily large spleen in his last letter. Locke tries to explain how such a condition could come about. He details his theory of the development of polyps and believes Sloane’s work on ‘imperfect plants’ will foster the perfection of ‘that part of natural history’. Locke is puzzled by the anomalies of biology, which do not fit with a ‘universal generation according to the ordinary philosophie’. He hopes Sloane’s thoughts on such topics will be published. Locke was a philosopher, physician, and highly influential proponent of liberalism in England (J. R. Milton, Locke, John (16321704), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16885, accessed 24 June 2013]).