The voyage was full of anxiety. Such news from England as had yet reached the West Indies was very fragmentary. And the lack of authentic intelligence about the outbreak of the Revolution and its results, had been eked-out by all sorts of wild rumours. The voyagers looked daily with intense eagerness for outward-bound ships that might bring them news, and were especially anxious to know if war had broken out between England and France. When they caught sight of a sail so wistfully watched for, they commonly observed in the other vessel as great a desire to avoid a meeting, as there was amongst themselves to ensure one.
The Duchess of Albemarle had with her a large amount of wealth in plate and jewels, as well as a large retinue. Her anxieties were not lessened when the captain of the frigate said to her Grace, two or three weeks after the departure from Port Royal: ‘I cannot fight any ship having King James’ commission, from whom I received mine.’ On hearing this assurance—which seemed to open to her the prospect, or at least the possible contingency, of being carried into France—the Duchess resolved to change her ship. With Sloane and with her suite she left the Assistance, and re-embarked, first in the late Duke’s yacht, and then in one of the larger ships of the fleet.
After this separation, ‘our Admiral’ says Sloane, ‘pretended he wanted water and must make the best of his way for England, without staying to convoy us home, which accordingly he did.’ The voyage, nevertheless, was made in safety.
They learned very little of what had happened at home, until they had arrived within a few leagues of Plymouth. Then Sloane himself went out, in an armed boat, with the intention of picking up such news as could be gathered from any fishermen who might be met with near the coast. The first fishing vessel they hailed did her best to run away, but was caught in the pursuit. |Ibid., p. 347.| To the question, ‘How is the King?’ the master’s reply was, ‘What King do you mean? King William is well at Whitehall. King James is in France.’
Sloane landed at Plymouth on the 29th of May, with large collections in all branches of natural history, and with improved prospects of fortune. The Duchess of Albemarle behaved to him with great liberality, and for some years to come he continued to be her domestic physician, and lived, for the most part, in one or other of her houses as his usual place of residence. In 1690 much of his correspondence bears date from the Duchess’ seat at New Hall, in Essex. In 1692 we find him frequently at Albemarle House, in Clerkenwell. He had also made, whilst in the West Indies, a lucky investment in the shape of a large purchase of Peruvian Bark. |Sloane Corresp., in MSS. Sloane.| It was already a lucrative article of commerce, and the provident importer had excellent professional opportunities of adding to its commercial value by making its intrinsic merits more widely known in England.
The botanists, more especially, were delighted with the large accessions to previous knowledge which Sloane had brought back with him. ‘When I first saw,’ said John Ray, ‘his stock of dried plants collected in Jamaica, and in some of the Caribbee Islands, I was much astonished at the number of the capillary kind, not thinking there had been so many to be found in both the Indies.’
The collector, himself, had presently his surprise in the matter, but it was of a less agreeable kind. ‘My collection,’ he says, ‘of dried samples of some very strange plants excited the curiosity of people who loved things of that nature to see them, and who were welcome, until I observed some so very curious as to desire to carry part of them privately home, and injure what they left. This made me upon my guard.’
On the 30th of November, 1693, Sloane was elected to the Secretaryship of the Royal Society. A year afterwards he was made Physician to Christ Hospital. It is eminently to his honour that from his first entrance into this office—which he held for thirty-six years—he applied the whole of its emoluments for the advantage and advancement of deserving boys who were receiving their education there. For that particular appointment he was himself none the richer, save in contentment and good works.
In 1696 he made his first appearance as an author by the publication of his Catalogus Plantarum quæ in insula Jamaica sponte proveniunt, vel vulgo coluntur cum earundem synonimis et locis natalibus: Adjectis aliis quibusdam quæ in insulis Madeira, Barbadoes, Nevis, et Sancti Christophori nascuntur. |1696.| He had already seen far too much of the world to marvel that his book soon brought him censure as well as praise. By Leonard Plukenet, a botanist of great acquirements and ability, many portions of the Jamaica Catalogue were attacked, sometimes on well-grounded objections; more often upon exceptions rather captious than just, and with that bitterness of expression which is the unfailing finger-post of envy. Plukenet’s strictures were published in his Almagesti Botanici Mantissa.[48] Sloane made no rash haste to answer his critic. Where the censure bore correction of real error or oversight, he carefully profited by it. Where it was the mere cloak of malice, he awaited without complaint the appropriate time for dealing, both with censure and censor, which would be sure to come when he should give to the world the ripened results of the voyage of 1687.
A passage in Dr. Sloane’s correspondence with Dr. Charlett, of Cambridge, written in the same year with the publication of the Jamaica Catalogue, shows that even whilst he was still almost at the threshold of his London life, he was able steadily to enlarge his museum. |Charlett to Sloane, in MS. Corresp., 4043, f. 193.| At that early date, Charlett, who had seen it during a visit to London, calls it already ‘a noble collection of all natural curiosities.’[49] The collector, when he landed its first fruits at Plymouth, had yet before him—such was to be his unusual length of days—almost sixty-four years of life. Not one of them, probably, passed without some valuable accession to his museum. And those sixty-four years were the adolescent and formative years of the study of the Physical Sciences in Britain. They were years, too, in the course of which there was to be a great development of British energy, both in foreign travel and in colonial enterprise. Very many were to run to and fro in the earth, so that knowledge might be largely increased. As a traveller, Sloane had already done his spell of work. But just as that was achieved, he was placed, by his election to the secretaryship to the Royal Society, precisely in the position where he could most extensively profit by a wide correspondence with men of like scientific pursuits all over the world, and could exercise a watchful observation over the doings and the opportunities of explorers.
But the most immediate result of his secretaryship was the resumption of the suspended Philosophical Transactions. The interruption of a work which had already rendered yeoman service to Science, abroad as well as at home, had been caused by a combination of unfavourable circumstances. The death of its first and energetic editor, Henry Oldenburg; some diminution in the Society’s income; and some personal disagreements at its Council board, seem all, in their measure, to have concurred to impede a publication, the continuance of which the best men in the Royal Society knew to be inseparable from the achievement of its true purposes. Sloane bestirred himself with the steady vigour which had been born with him; impressed his friends into the service; profited by the foreign connections he had formed ten years earlier at Paris, Bordeaux, and Montpelier, and so found new channels by which to enrich the pages of the Transactions, as well as to extend their circulation.
He did it, of course, in his own way, and under the necessary influence of his habits and predispositions. One natural result of his labours, as secretary and as editor, was a frequent prominence of medical subjects, both at the meetings and in the subsequent selections for permanent record. If such a prominence might now and then give, or seem to give, fair ground of complaint to men whose thoughts were absorbed in the calculus of fluxions, or whose eyes were wont to search the heavens that they might learn the courses of the stars, it had at least the excuse that it tended to the elevation—in all senses of the word—of a profession in the thorough education and the dignified status of which all the world have a deep interest.
If Sloane, in his day, occasionally made scientific men somewhat more familiar with medical themes than they cared to be, he did very much to make medical men aware of the peculiar duty under which their profession laid them of becoming also men of true science. And in this way he exerted an influence upon medical knowledge, which was none the less pregnant with good and enduring results because it was in great measure an indirect influence. It was one of the minor, but memorable, results of the establishment of the Royal Society that it tended powerfully to lift medical practice out of the slough of quackery.
This frequent reading of medical papers during the Doctor’s secretaryship could not fail to give an opening, now and again, for the wit of the scorner. A physician, in his daily practice, is constantly seeing the power of small things. He may well, at times, over estimate trifles. In the year 1700, Dr. Sloane was made the subject of a satirical pamphlet which appeared under the title of ‘The Transactioneer, with some of his Philosophical Fancies.’ The author of the satire was Dr. William King, but, for a considerable time, the authorship was unknown. There was great anxiety to discover it, not only on Sloane’s part individually, but on the part of the Council at large. The whole affair was trivial, and would be unworthy of memory but that it led to some dissensions within the Society itself, which for a long time left marks of their influence.
Sloane conceived that The Transactioneer was the production of Dr. John Woodward—the author of Natural History of the Earth—who was himself a member of the Royal Society’s Council. Woodward, in denying the imputation, endorsed the satire. ‘Whether there was not some occasion given,’ he said to the Council, ‘may be worth your consideration. This I am sure of: The world has been now, for some time past, very loud upon that subject. |Newton Correspondence and Papers; cited by Brewster, in Memoirs, &c. (2nd Edit.), vol. ii, ff. 185, 186.| And there were those who laid the charges so much wrong, that I have but too often had occasion to vindicate the Society itself, and that in public company.’ The ill feeling thus excited lasted a long time. It seemed at length, that the Society must lose either the services of its laborious Secretary or those of his active-tongued opponent.
The petty dissension came to a height when Sloane chanced to make some passing medical comment on the words ‘the bezoar is a gall-stone,’ occurring in a paper which he was reading to the Society, from the Memoirs of the Parisian Academy of Sciences. Sloane’s casual remark drew from Woodward the offensive words, ‘No man who understands anatomy would make such an assertion.’ On another occasion he interrupted some observation or other made by Sloane, by exclaiming—‘Speak sense, or English, and we shall understand you.’ A friend or two of Woodward tried hard to back him by enlisting the illustrious President on their side. They reminded Newton that he had been often himself impatient under the medical dissertations, and they praised Dr. Woodward’s acquirements in philosophy. ‘For a seat in the Council,’ replied Sir Isaac, ‘a man should be a moral philosopher, as well as a natural one.’ |Records of the Royal Society.| Eventually, it was resolved: ‘That Dr. Woodward be removed from the Council, for creating a disturbance by the said reflecting words upon Dr. Sloane.’ The latter was of a very forgiving temper, and he soon sought to be reconciled with his adversary.
His professional course, meanwhile, was steadily upward. A friendship which he had contracted in 1705 with Dr. Sydenham greatly aided his progress. Sydenham was retiring from practice, and gave to Sloane his cordial recommendations. In 1712[50] he was made Physician Extraordinary to the Queen, whom he attended, two years afterwards, on her death bed. He filled the office of Physician-in-Chief to George the First, by whom, on the 3rd April, 1716, he was created a Baronet. He was, I believe, the first physician who received that dignity. In 1719 he became President of the College of Physicians. In 1727 he received the crowning honour of a life which, to an unusual degree, had already been replete with honourable distinctions of almost every kind. He was placed in the chair of the Royal Society, as the next successor of Newton.
Eighteen years before, he had been welcomed into the illustrious Academy of Sciences, the establishment of which at Paris had followed so quickly upon the foundation of the Royal Society. Both academies had worked with conspicuous success. Both had been adorned by a long line of eminent members. They had frequently, and in many ways, interchanged friendly communion. To Sloane himself, the reception at Paris had been the prelude of many like invitations from other learned societies in various parts of Europe. No man of his time had a worthier estimate of the dignity involved in the freemasonry of science, nor had any a more conscientious sense of the duties and responsibilities which it entails.
As President of the Royal Society, one of his earliest proposals to the Council was that, for the future, no pecuniary contribution should be received from foreign members whose fellowship it invited as an honour. He urged this step, notwithstanding that the Society was at the time in debt from an unusual arrear of subscriptions,—an arrear so great that he felt it to be right that the Council should be recommended to sue their offending brethren in the law courts. His third proposal, like both the others, had for its object the incontestible advantage and honour of the Society. He checked some nascent abuses in elections by making it necessary that there should be an express approval of every new candidate by the Council, on the recommendation of not less than three fellows, before proceeding to a ballot in the Society at large.
The work by which Sloane holds his chief place in the literature of science, the Natural History of Jamaica, was the work of no less than thirty-eight years. Its materials, as we have seen, were collected in the years 1687 and 1688. The first volume was not published until 1708. Seventeen additional years elapsed before the completion of the second. The fact indicates how crowded with avocations its author’s life was, as well as the marked conscientiousness and thoroughness which from youth to age characterized his doings.
The Jamaica book cannot be opened without some appreciation, even at first sight, of this faculty of thoroughness. For it is shown not more by the elaboration and beauty of the illustrations, than by the copious citation of authorities, on all points in relation to which authority is valuable. That all previous labourers in his field should have their full meed of acknowledgment is with Sloane a prime anxiety.
The West Indian Voyage of 1687–89 had had, it may here be remarked, other results besides that of exciting new emulation—at home and abroad—in the study of natural history, and in the amassing in cabinets and presses of the dried and preserved objects of that study. It gave a marked impulse to arboriculture, both in England and in Ireland. What Sloane had to show, and to tell of, led to the sending oversea of vessels expressly prepared for the transport of living trees; and several noble ornaments of our parks and pleasure grounds date their introduction to English and Irish soil from the expeditions so set on foot.
The Natural History of Jamaica excited considerable interest abroad, as well as at home. |Corresp. of Sloane and Briasson; in MS. Sloane, 4039, ff. 136–140.| Bernard de Jussieu offered to undertake the editorship of a French translation, and Briasson, a Parisian bookseller of some eminence, wrote to Sloane that he was willing to incur the charges and risk of publication, on condition that the author would send the copper plates of the original work to Paris, for use in the new edition. Sir Hans, however, objected to incur the risk of this transmission across the channel, but was willing to have the needful impression worked off in London; an arrangement to which the Parisian, in his turn, was disinclined to assent, being of opinion—perhaps not unjustly—that, in 1743, the art of copperplate printing was better understood in Paris than in London. On these grounds the negotiation was broken off.
Amidst these varied avocations, the growth of the library and museum went on unceasingly. Friends and foes contributed, in turn, to its enrichment. The year 1702 saw the incorporation with the original gatherings of the West India voyage of the splendid collections of Courten, the friend of Sloane’s youth. In 1710, Sir Hans acquired the valuable herbaria of his old assailant, Leonard Plukenet. In 1718 he purchased the extensive collections, in all departments of natural history, of another friend of early years, James Petiver. The herbarium of Adam Buddle, a botanist little remembered now but of note in his generation, came to Sloane, as a token of friendship, from the death-bed of its collector. |MS. Sloane, 4069, passim.| The scientific possessions of Dr. Christopher Merret were purchased from his son, and from time to time, when valuable collections were known to be on sale upon the Continent, agents went across to buy.
Of these numerous sources of augmentation the museum of Petiver was next in importance to that of Courten—but with a considerable interval. It is said (in the contemporary correspondence, as I think) that its cost to Sloane was four thousand pounds. But remembering what four thousand pounds was a hundred and fifty years ago, there is reason to suspect some exaggeration in the statement.
James Petiver, when Sir Hans first became acquainted with him, was serving, as an apprentice, the then apothecary of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. He afterwards became apothecary to the Charter House. He had, in one way or other, made for himself a singularly extensive acquaintance amongst seafaring men; and by their help had established an almost world-wide correspondence with people interested in natural history, or possessed of special opportunities for gathering its rarities. Of such rarities, Sloane somewhere says, ‘He had procured, I believe, a greater quantity than any man before him.’ But in course of time his collections overpowered his means, or his industry, for the work of preservation and arrangement. When, at the collector’s death, they passed into the possession of his friend, choice specimens were found, not in order, but in heaps. The due classification and ordering occupied many hands during many months.
The charities of human life were not, in the breast of Sir Hans Sloane, choked either by the various allurements and preoccupations of science, or by the ceaseless toils of a busy and anxious profession. He was a very liberal giver, and also a discriminating and conscientious giver. I have rarely seen a correspondence which mirrors more strikingly than does that of Sloane, a just and equable attention to multifarious and often conflicting claims.
The multiplicity of the claims was, indeed, as notable as was the patience with which they were listened to. Not to dwell upon the innumerable gropings after money of which, in one form or other, every man who attains any sort of eminence is sure to have his share (but of which Sir Hans Sloane seems to have had a Benjamin’s portion) or upon interminable requests for the use of influence, at Court, at the Treasury, at the London Hospitals, at the Council Boards of the Royal Society or of the College of Physicians, and elsewhere; his fame brought upon him a mass of appeals and solicitations from utter strangers, busied with less worldly aims and pursuits. Enthusiastic students of the deep things of theology sought his opinion on abstruse and mystical doctrines. Advocates of perpetual peace, and of the transformation, at a breath, of the Europe of the eighteenth century into a new Garden of Eden, implored him to endorse their theories, or to interpret their dreams.
His replies are sometimes both characteristic and amusing; none the less so for the fact that his power of writing was, at all times, far beneath his other mental powers and attainments. Now and then, though rarely, a touch of humour lights up the homeliness of phrase.
To one of the enthusiasts in mystic divinity, who had sent for his perusal an enormous manuscript, he replied: ‘I am very much obliged for the esteem you have of my knowledge, which, I am very sure, comes far short of your opinion. |Sloane to Gabriel Nisbett, May, 1737, MS. Sloane, 4069, f. 38.| As to the particular controversies on foot in relation to Natural and Revealed Religion, and to Predestination, I am no ways further concerned than to act as my own conscience directs me in those matters; and am no judge for other people.... I have not time to peruse the book you sent.’
To the worthy and once famous Abbé de Saint Pierre, who would fain have established with Sloane a steady correspondence on the universal amelioration of mankind, by means of a vast series of measures, juridical, political, and politico-economical, which started from the total abolition of vice and of war, and descended to the improvement of road-making by some happy anticipation—a hundred years in advance—of our own Macadam, he wrote thus: ‘I should be very glad to see a general Peace established, for ever. |Sloane to St. Pierre, MS. Sloane, 4069, f. 44.| Rumours of war are often, indeed, found to be baseless, and the fears of it, even when well grounded, are often dissipated by an unlooked-for Providence. But poor mortals are often so weak as to suffer, in their health, from the fear of danger, where there is none!’
Letters on high themes like these had their frequent variety, in the shape of proffers of contributions, to be made upon terms, for the enlargement of the Museum, the fame of which had now spread into very humble ranks of society. A single specimen in this kind will suffice: ‘I understand,’ wrote a correspondent of a speculative turn, ‘you are a great virtuoso, and gives a valuable consideration for novelties of antiquity,’—on getting thus far in the perusal, one can imagine Sir Hans murmuring ‘not willingly, I assure you,’—‘a pin has been many hundred years in our family, and was, I am told, the pin of the first Saxon king of the West Angles,’ and so on.
Until the year 1741, a few months after his resignation of the chair of the Royal Society on the score of old age, Sir Hans Sloane continued to live chiefly in London; though often removing, for part of the summer months, to his Manor House in the then charming suburb of Chelsea. He had purchased that valuable manor, from the family of Cheyne, in 1714. The fine old House abounded in historical recollections and amongst them, as most readers will remember, in associations connected with the memory of Sir Thomas More. It had the additional attraction of a large and beautiful garden, close to that other garden in which the now Lord of the Manor had pursued, with all the energies of youth, the study of botany. One of his earliest acts of lordship had been a graceful gift to the Company of Apothecaries, of the freehold in the land of which till then they had been tenants. In 1741 he transferred his Museum and Library from Bloomsbury to Chelsea. His former house—situated in Great Russell Street, near the corner of what is now Bloomsbury Square—had been capacious, but the new one admitted of a greatly improved arrangement and display of the collections.
The state and character of the Sloane Museum, in the fullness to which the collector had brought it during these latest years of his life, can scarcely be exemplified better than in a contemporary account of a visit which was paid to the Manor House at Chelsea by the Prince and Princess of Wales, in the year 1748. I quote it, almost verbally, from the Gentleman’s Magazine of that year, but with some unimportant omissions.
At that date, the Manor House formed a square of above a hundred feet on each side, enclosing a court. Three of the principal rooms were, on the occasion of this royal visit, filled successively—as the visitors passed from one room into another—with the finest portions of the collections in its most portable departments. The minerals were first shown. The tables were spread with drawers filled with all sorts of precious stones in their natural beds, as they are found in the earth, except the first table, which contained stones found in animals, such as pearls, bezoars, and the like. Emeralds, topazes, amethysts, sapphires, garnets, rubies, diamonds, ... with magnificent vessels of cornelian, onyx, sardonyx and jasper, delighted the eye, says the attendant describer, and raised the mind to praise the great Creator of all things.
When their Royal Highnesses, continues our narrator, had viewed one room, and went into another, the scene was shifted. When they returned, the same tables were covered, for a second course, with all sorts of jewels, polished and set after the modern fashion, and with gems carved and engraved. For the third course, the tables were spread with gold and silver ores, and with the most precious and remarkable ores used in the dresses of men from Siberia to the Cape of Good Hope, from Japan to Peru; and with both ancient and modern coins in gold and silver.
The gallery, a hundred and ten feet in length, presented a ‘surprising prospect.’ The most beautiful corals, crystals, and figured stones; the most brilliant insects; shells, painted with as great variety as the precious stones; and birds vying with the gems; diversified with remains of the antediluvian world.
Then a noble vista presented itself through several rooms filled with books; among these were many hundred volumes of dried plants; a room, full of choice and valuable manuscripts; and the rich present sent by the French King to Sir Hans of the engravings of his collections of paintings, medals, and statues, and of his Palaces, in twenty-five large atlas volumes.
Below stairs, some rooms were then shown, filled with the antiquities of Egypt, Greece, Etruria, Rome, Britain, and even America; other rooms and the Great Saloon were filled with preserved animals. The halls were decorated with the horns of divers creatures. |G. M., vol. xviii, pp. 301, 302. (July, 1748.)| ‘Fifty volumes in folio,’ concludes the enthusiastic bystander who chronicled, for Mr. Sylvanus Urban, the royal visit of 1748, ‘would scarce suffice to contain a detail of this immense Museum, consisting of above 200,000 articles.’
The Prince of Wales, on taking leave of his host, gave expression to a wish which he did not live long enough to see realised. ‘It is a great pleasure to me,’ he said, ‘to see so magnificent a collection in England. It is an ornament to the Nation. Great honour would redound from the establishing of it for public use, to the latest posterity.’
Plans, more or less definite, of perpetuating those collections for public use had occasionally engaged their owner’s thoughts almost from the date of his acquisition of the Museum of William Courten, in 1702. |The Will and Codicils of 1749–51.| In 1707, he had watched with interest a scheme that had been set on foot for the formation of a Public Library in London by combining the old Royal Collection with the collections of Sir Robert Cotton and of the Royal Society.[51] But that scheme failed of execution, until, almost half a century later, it was, in the main, revived and carried out as the indirect but very natural consequence of his own testamentary dispositions.
His Will, in its first form, was made at Chelsea in 1748, but was replaced on the 10th July, 1749, by the following codicil:—
‘Whereas I have in and by my said Will given some directions about the sale and disposition of my Museum, or collection of rarities herein more particularly mentioned, now I do hereby revoke my said Will, as far as relates thereto, and I do direct and appoint concerning the same in the following manner: Having had from my youth a strong inclination to the study of plants and all other productions of nature, and having through the course of many years, with great labour and expense, gathered together whatever could be procured either in our own or foreign countries that was rare and curious; and being fully convinced that nothing tends more to raise our ideas of the power, wisdom, goodness, providence, and other perfections of the Deity, or more to the comfort and well being of his creatures, than the enlargement of our knowledge of the works of nature, I do will and desire that for the promoting of these noble ends, the glory of God, and the good of man, my collection in all its branches may be, if possible, kept and preserved together whole and entire, in my Manor House in the Parish of Chelsea, situate near the Physic Garden given by me to the Company of Apothecaries for the same purposes; and having great reliance that the right honourable, honourable, and other persons hereafter named, will be influenced by the same principles and [will] faithfully and conscientiously discharge the trust hereby reposed in them, I do give, devise, and bequeath, unto the Rt. Hon. Charles Sloane Cadogan ... [and to forty-nine other persons whose names follow,] all that my Collection or Museum at, in, or about, my Manor House at Chelsea aforesaid, which consists of too great a variety to be particularly described, but ... which are more particularly described, mentioned, and numbered, with short histories or accounts of them, with proper references, in certain catalogues by me made, containing thirty-eight volumes in folio, and eight volumes in quarto,—except such framed pictures as are not marked with the word “Collection”—to have and to hold to them and their successors and assigns for ever, ... upon the trusts, and for the uses and purposes, ... hereafter particularly specified concerning the same.
‘And for rendering this my intention more effectual that the said Collection may be preserved and continued entire in its utmost perfection and regularity, and being assured that nothing will conduce more to this than placing the same under the direction and care of learned, experienced, and judicious persons who are above all low and mean views, I do earnestly desire that the King, H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, H.R.H. William, Duke of Cumberland, the Archbishop of Canterbury for the time being ... |Authentic Copies, &c. (B. M.) 17, p. 12.| [and twenty-eight others, being chiefly great Officers of State] will condescend so far as to act and be Visitors of my said Museum and Collection; and I do hereby, with their leave, nominate and appoint them Visitors thereof, with full power and authority for any five or more of them to enter my said Collection or Museum, at any time or times, to peruse, supervise, and examine, the same, and the management thereof, and to visit, correct, and reform, from time to time, as there may be occasion, either jointly with the said Trustees or separately—upon application to them for that purpose, or otherwise—all abuses, defects, neglects or mismanagements, that may happen to arise therein, or touching and concerning the person or persons, officer or officers, that are or shall be appointed to attend the same.
‘And my will is and I do hereby request and desire that the said Trustees, or any seven or more of them, do make their humble application to His Majesty, or to Parliament at the next session after my decease,—as shall be thought most proper,—in order to pay the full and clear sum of twenty thousand pounds unto my executors or to the survivors of them, in consideration of the said Collection or Museum; it not being, as I apprehend or believe, a fourth of their real and intrinsic value; and also to obtain such effectual powers and authorities for vesting in the said Trustees all and every part of my said Collection, ... and also my said capital Manor-House, with such gardens and outhouses as shall thereunto belong and be used by me at the time of my decease, in which it is my desire that the same shall be kept and preserved; and also the water of or belonging to my Manor of Chelsea coming from Kensington, or right of patronage of the Church of Chelsea; to the end the same premises may be absolutely vested in the said Trustees for the preserving and continuing my said Museum in such manner as they shall think most likely to answer the public benefit by me intended, and also obtain, as aforesaid, a sufficient fund and provision for maintaining and supporting my said Manor House, ... to be vested in the said Trustees for ever.... |Authentic Copies, &c. (B. M.) 17, p. 12.| And it is also my will and desire that all such other powers ... may be added or vested as well in the said intended Trustees as in the Visitors hereby appointed, as shall by the Legislature be thought most proper and convenient for the better management, order, and care, of my said Collection and premises.’
Provision is then made, in subsequent clauses of this codicil, for the replacement, by the Trustees surviving, from time to time, of vacancies occasioned by death in the ranks of the Trustees first appointed; and by surviving Visitors of vacancies so occasioned in those of the original Visitors.
In September, 1750, another codicil added to the list of Visitors—in order to supply vacancies which death had already wrought—the Earls of Macclesfield and Shelburne, and the then Master of the Rolls, Sir John Strange, with proviso of succession for the Master of the Rolls of the time being. Sir John Bernard, Sir William Calvert, and Mr. Slingsby Bethel were, in like manner, added to the roll of Trustees. The same codicil excepted the advowson of the Rectory of Chelsea from the bequest of 1749, and annexed it to the lordship of the Manor.
By his marriage with the daughter and heiress of Mr. Langley, an Alderman of London, Sir Hans Sloane had issue two daughters, but no son. The elder of the daughters, Sarah Sloane, married George Stanley, of Poultons, in Hampshire; the younger, Elizabeth, married Lord Cadogan. By the representatives of those co-heiresses the large inheritance was eventually enjoyed.
A subsequent codicil of 1751, added nine other Trustees, five of whom were distinguished foreigners. Among the four English names are those of John Hampden (‘twenty-fourth hereditary lord of Great Hampden,’ and last lineal male descendant of that famous stock) and William Sotheby.
The declining years of a man to whom had been given, not only unusual length of days, but an unusual span both of bodily and of mental vigour, so that he remained in the rank of busy men until he had passed his eightieth year, were necessarily days of seclusion. He had enjoyed not only the honours[52] and the comforts, but the troop of friends which should accompany old age. Yet a man who reaches the age of ninety-two must needs lose the friends of his maturity, as well as the friends of his youth. Sir Hans Sloane, in the old Manor House of Chelsea, had something of the experience which made a famous statesman of our own day, who was loth to leave the stir of London life, say—with a sigh—‘I see all the world passing my windows, but few come in.’
His chief recreations, in those latest years, lay in the continued examination of the stores of nature and of art which never palled upon his capacity of enjoyment, and in the regular weekly visit of a much younger man, who was very conversant in the busy world without; who could talk, and talk well, alike upon public events, upon the novelties of science, and upon the gossip of the coffee-houses and the clubs. This friend of old age was George Edwards, a naturalist of considerable acquirements, and the author of some Essays on Natural History which are still worth reading.
Sloane’s mental vigour long outlived his power of bodily locomotion. For years he could move from room to room, or on very bright days from room to garden, only by the aid of an invalid chair. In other respects, his health gave a weighty sanction to the counsel which he had been wont to give, not infrequently, in lieu of an invited but superfluous prescription. ‘I advise you’ he would say, ‘to what I practice myself. I never take physic when I am well. When I am ill, I take little, and only such as has been very well tried.’
The end of a bright, abundant, and most useful life, came at the beginning of the year 1753. On the tenth of January, George Edwards found him rapidly sinking, and suffering greatly. On the eleventh he found him at the point of death. ‘I continued with him,’ he wrote, ‘later than any one of his relatives. But I was obliged to retire—his last agonies being beyond what I could bear; although, under his pain and weakness of body, he seemed to retain a great firmness of mind and resignation to the will of God.’ He was buried at Chelsea, in the same vault in which, twenty-eight years before, he had buried his wife.
This indefatigable collector had continued to enrich his Museum with new accessions as long as he lived. We have the means of estimating its growth—as regards mere numbers, of course—by comparing a synoptical table drawn up in 1725—for the purpose of showing to certain grumblers what had been the nature and aim of those avocations which had delayed the completion of the Natural History of Jamaica—with another table drawn up by his Trustees immediately after his death.
The comparison of numbers shows that the twenty thousand two hundred and twenty-eight coins and medals of 1725 had grown, in 1752, to thirty-two thousand. Other antiquities had increased from eight hundred and twenty-four to two thousand six hundred and thirty-five. The minerals and fossils had increased from about three thousand to five thousand eight hundred and twenty-two specimens. The botanical collection which, in 1725, had numbered eight thousand two hundred and twenty-six specimens, together with a Hortus Siccus of two hundred volumes, had become in 1752 twelve thousand five hundred specimens, with a Hortus Siccus of three hundred and thirty-four volumes. The other natural history collections had increased on the average by more than one half. The details are as follows:—
| Volumes in 1725. | Volumes in 1753. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 2,686 | 1. | Manuscripts | 3,516 |
| 136 | 2. | Drawings | 347 |
| 3. | Printed Books | about 40,000 | |
| 200 | 4. | Hortus Siccus | 334 |
| Specimens in 1725. | Specimens in 1753. | ||
| 20,228 | 5. | Medals and Coins | 32,000 |
| 302 | 6. | Antiquities | 1,125 |
| 81* | 7. | Seals, &c. | 268 |
| 441* | 8. | Cameos and Intaglios | about 700 |
| 1,394 | 9. | Precious Stones | 2,256 |
| [*See under No. 8.] | 10. | Vessels of Agate, Jasper, &c. | 542 |
| 1,025 | 11. | Crystals, Spars, &c. | 1,864 |
| 730 | 12. | Fossils, &c. | 1,275 |
| 1,394 | 13. | Metals and Mineral Ores | 2,725 |
| 536 | 14. | Earths, Sands, Salts, &c. | 1,035 |
| 249 | 15. | Bitumens, Sulphurs, &c. | 399 |
| 169 | 16. | Talcs, Micæ, &c. | 388 |
| 3,753 | 17. | Shells | 5,843 |
| 804 | 18. | Corals, Sponges, &c. | 1,421 |
| 486 | 19. | Echini, Echinites, &c. | 659 |
| 183 | 20. | Asteriæ, Trochi, &c. | 241 |
| 263 | 21. | Crustacea | 363 |
| 22. | Stellæ Marinæ | 173 | |
| 1,007 | 23. | Fishes, and their parts | 1,555 |
| 753 | 24. | Birds, and their parts | 1,172 |
| 345 | 25. | Vipers, &c. | 521 |
| 1,194 | 26. | Quadrupeds | 1,886 |
| 3,824 | 27. | Insects | 5,439 |
| 507 | 28. | Anatomical Preparations, &c. | 756 |
| 8,226 | 29. | Vegetables | 12,506 |
| 1,169 | 30. | Miscellaneous things | 2,098 |
| 319 | 31. | Pictures and Drawings, framed | 310 |
| 54 | 32. | Mathematical Instruments | 55 |
On the 27th January—sixteen days after Sir Hans’ death—about forty of the Trustees named in the Will met at Chelsea, to confer with the Executors. Lord Cadogan produced the Will and its Codicils. By these, should the bequest and its additions be accepted, the manor house and land, together with the collection in its existing state and arrangement, would be given to the Public. This, said Lord Cadogan, will save the hazard and expense of removal. Mr. William Sloane then informed the Trustees that the Executors had thought it prudent temporarily to remove the medals of gold and silver, the precious stones, gems, and vases, to the Bank of England, in order to ensure their present safety.
The Earl of Macclesfield was then placed in the chair. A synopsis of the contents of the Museum was read by Mr. James Empson, who had acted as its curator for many years. Mr. Empson was appointed to act as Secretary to the Trustees, and a form of Memorial to be addressed to the King, in order to the carrying out of the trusts of the Will, was agreed upon.
The Memorial had—eventually—the desired effect. |The Act for Establishing the British Museum.| It led, in the course of the year 1753, to the passing of an Act of Parliament—26 George II, chapter 22—which is entitled An Act for the purchase of the Museum or Collection of Sir Hans Sloane, and of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts, and for providing one General Repository for the better reception and more convenient use of the said Collections, and of the Cottonian Library, and of the additions thereto.
The Act recites the tenour of the testamentary dispositions made by Sir Hans Sloane. It also recites that a provisional assent had been given by his Trustees to the removal of his Museum from the Manor House of Chelsea ‘to any proper place within the Cities of London and Westminster, or the suburbs thereof, if such removal shall be judged most advantageous to the Public.’
The Act then proceeds to declare that, ‘Whereas, all arts and sciences have a connexion with each other, and discoveries in natural philosophy and other branches of speculative knowledge,’ for the advancement whereof the Museum was intended, may, in many instances, give help to useful experiments and inventions, ‘therefore, to the end that the said Museum may be preserved and maintained, not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and the curious, but for the general use and benefit of the Public,’ it is enacted by Parliament that the sum of twenty thousand pounds shall be paid to the Executors of Sir Hans Sloane, in full satisfaction for his said Museum.
In this Statute, also, the preceding original Act for the public establishment of the Cottonian Library (12th and 13th of William III, c. 7), together with the subsequent Act on that subject (5th Anne, c. 30), are severally recited, and it is declared as follows:—