Letter 4524

Garcin received Sloane’s letter. He writes of Louis Bourget, the Chair of Philosophy at Neuchâtel. Garcin encloses a figure of a butterfly. There was no entry for it in Ruysch’s ‘l’histoire des Insectes’. He will soon send a botanical account. Laurent Garcin (1683-1752) was a physician and botanist. He studied in the Netherlands and served as a naval surgeon from 1720 to 1729, traveling throughout the East Indies. He described plants from Java, Malacca, Persia, and Arabia. Garcin sent Indian and Chinese medical information to Herman Boerhaave. He settled in Leiden and corresponded with Antoine de Jussieu and others, becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1731. Garcin’s work was published in the Mémoires de l’académie (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurent_Garcin).