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. [Sidenote: SYNOPTICAL TABLES OF THE SLOANE MUSEUM.] 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.