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. [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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.