10 MEMOIR OP SIR HANS SLOANE, BART. 



In 1727; Sir Hans Sloane succeeded Sir Isaac Newton in the 

 presidency of the Royal Society, and was the first medical president 

 of that learned body. Soon afterwards he presented to the Society 

 one hundred guineas, and a bust of King Charles II., its founder, 

 besides being mainly instrumental in procuring the endowment for 

 Sir Godfrey Copley's annual gold medal. In this year, Sir Hans 

 published the second volume of his Natural History of Jamaica, fyc, 

 just twenty years after the appearance of the first ; and in the Pre- 

 face to the former, he accounts for this long delay by enumerating 

 the various articles which then formed his museum, and states that 

 he had numbered and catalogued the whole of them himself, 

 amounting to the immense quantity of nearly 40,000 articles, in- 

 cluding 20,000 coins and medals, 2666 volumes of MSS., and 7,671 

 Greek and Latin medical authors,* without reckoning a great vari- 

 ety of other books ;t and all this was effected, it should be remem- 

 bered, not in learned leisure, but at intervals snatched from the ex- 

 ercise of his profession, and from the hours usually devoted to sleep. 

 During the greater part of the time employed in arranging and 

 cataloguing his vast collections, Sir Hans was in constant attend- 

 ance on the royal family, and his practice was, probably, as exten- 

 sive as that of Sir Henry Halford or Sir Benjamin Brodie in the 

 present day. 



From this period till 1740 he devoted a great part of his time to 

 the fulfilment of the duties of the high offices which he held, to the 

 enlargement of his museum, and to the "diffusion of useful know- 

 ledge :" not that sort of knowledge so ycleped in modern times — but 

 to the promulgation of every discovery in the healing art which his 

 wisdom and long experience considered beneficial in all those " ills 

 which flesh is heir to." Many marine productions, also, hitherto 

 neglected and despised as useless, were, through his exertions, ren- 

 dered articles of commerce to those who " went down to the sea in 

 ships, and beheld the wonders of the great deep." To these vari- 

 ous occupations must be added that occasioned by the voluminous 

 correspondence which he carried on, for a long series of years, with 

 the learned and scientific in every part of the known world, and 

 which are to be found among his other MSS. in the British Muse- 

 um. These numerous friends and correspondents continually sup- 



* Van der Linden's book, De Scriptis Medicis, published in 1687, consider- 

 ed the best medical bibliography of the day, enumerates only 3937 ; to these 

 Sir Hans added 3734 ; a sufficient instance of his zeal and industry in pro- 

 moting the objects of his profession. 



+ Sloane's Jamaica, voL ii,— Introduction, pp. ii., iii. 



