The British Museum was established by Parliament in 1753. In that year, by the statute 26 Geo. II. cap. 22, a trust was created to unite and maintain as one collection the Museum of Sir Hans Sloane, the Cottonian Library, and the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts. Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753),[2] physician, botanist, and President of the Royal Society in succession to Newton, had formed in his lifetime a very extensive museum, consisting mainly of books, natural history collections, and ethnographical objects. At the same time classical antiquities were represented by bronzes, gems, vases, terracottas, and a few sculptures in marble. The examples, however, of Greek sculpture were few and unimportant, and in most instances they cannot now be recognized with certainty from the brief entries in Sir Hans Sloane's catalogue. Such as they were, they were chiefly derived from the collection of John Kemp, an antiquary and collector early in the eighteenth century (died 1717). The Sloane Collection included the sepulchral vase, No. 682 in the present volume; a small relief with two dogs and a wild boar; a figure of Asclepios, a few heads, busts, urns of marble or alabaster, and a few Greek and Latin inscriptions. Three of the pieces of sculpture in the Museum are said by Sloane[3] to have been derived from the Arundel Collection, which was the first great collection of classical antiques formed in this country. Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (1585-1646), was the first Englishman who employed agents to collect for him in Greece and the Greek Islands, as well as in Italy. The collection thus formed was broken up in the reign of Charles II. The inscriptions were given by Henry Howard, afterwards sixth Duke of Norfolk, to the University of Oxford in 1667. The sculptures were scattered. A part passed through the hands of the Earls of Pomfret to the University of Oxford, while others were lost, or dispersed among private collectors.[4] The few examples named above thus found their way into the original collection of the British Museum. A more important fragment, however, from the Arundel Collection was added to the Museum at an early date, namely the bronze head, formerly known as Homer,[5] which was presented by the ninth Earl of Exeter in 1760. This head had previously been in the collection of Dr. Richard Mead,[6] physician and antiquary (1673-1754), and was sold with his collection in 1754.[7] Between the foundation of the British Museum in 1753 and the accession of the Townley Collection in 1805, the collection of sculpture made but slow progress. The first donor of sculpture was Thomas Hollis (1720-1774), of Corscombe, in Dorsetshire, a collector, and benefactor to several branches of the Museum. In 1757 Hollis gave a collection of antiquities, including several marbles, chiefly small busts and inscriptions.[8] In 1764 he gave a Greek relief, which cannot be identified, and in 1765 a marble head of a Faun.