There is one part of Sloane’s life though that I want to highlight because I think it is important for assessing Sloane’s role as a man of science – that is, his roles, both formal and informal, as a hub in the growing web of knowledge. Much of Delbourgo’s book focuses on Sloane’s fieldwork in Jamaica and on the objects he acquired, but he also notes Sloane’s roles as Secretary and President of the Royal Society, editor of the Royal Society’s journal, and as the center of an extensive network of international collectors and entrepreneurs.

One way to think about Sloane as a proto-scientist is to see him as a kind of high-class, new and improved antiquarian, i.e., someone who collects antiquities and rarities but with some extra-added science-y something. Delbourgo tells us about reliquaries and Renaissance wonder-cabinets, and it is easy to see Sloane as a part of that club. But Delbourgo goes to some lengths to emphasize Sloane’s emphasis on note-taking to establish the circumstances and context surrounding the specimens and objects Sloane collected in Jamaica. Sloane used this information to create labels and catalogs. Together with drawings made in situ and the collected objects/specimens themselves, Sloane’s draftsmen made high-quality synthetic pictures. These pictures and accompanying texts were published many years later, and the objects/specimens were displayed in Sloane’s private museum. Few people saw either Sloane’s museum or a copy of his books. And, as Delbourgo notes, almost nobody has used any of Sloane’s collection in any significant scientific way. So, is the note-taking and labeling the ‘science-y’ something that makes Sloane a proto-scientist?

There are other ways to think about Sloane though. We could see him as an institution builder, someone who enables others. Vannevar Bush in the early 20C famously took on that role in the transition to Big Science in the US. Or we could see him as providing the raw material for theoreticians to puzzle over – much as Hipparchus and Tycho provided astronomical data for Ptolemy and Kepler, respectively. If we are to see Sloane as a scientist, I think it is in one of these last two roles where he made his biggest contributions. My own take is that his influence was biggest as an institutionalist (beefing up the parts of the Republic of Letters that connected like-minded people). But he did provide pictures for Linnaeus and samples for John Ray, so that was a contribution. Whatever Sloane’s contributions to science, he gave Delbourgo a marvelous protagonist for his tour d’horizon of this period of English history.