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.

Resumption of the ‘Philosophical Transactions.’

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 and Woodward.

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.