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pitals, heard the lectures of Tournefort, De Verney, and other eminent masters; and visited all the literati, who received him with particular marks of esteem. From Paris he went to Montpelier; and, being furnished with letters from M. Tournefort to M. Chirac, then chancellor of that university, he found easy access to all the learned men of the province, particularly to M. Magnol, whom he accompanied in his botanical excursions in the environs of that city. Having here found an ample field for contemplation suited to his taste, he took leave of his two companions, who went into Italy. After spending a year in collecting plants he travelled through Languedoc with the same design; and, passing through Thoulouse and Bourdeaux, returned to Paris, where he made a short stay. In 1684 he returned to England. On his arrival in London he called for his two illustrious friends, Mr. Ray and Mr. Boyle, to communicate to them the discoveries he had made. The latter he found at home, but the former had retired to Essex, to which place Mr. Sloane transmitted a great variety of plants and seeds, which Mr. Ray has described in his History of Plants, and for which he makes a proper acknowledgment. Not long after this he was proposed by Dr. Martin Lister as a candidate to be admitted a member of the Royal Society, and was elected on the 21st January 1685. He soon after communicated some curiosities to the society. On the 12th April 1687 he was chosen a fellow of the college of physicians in London. On the 12th September he embarked at Portsmouth for Jamaica with the duke of Albemarle, who had been appointed governor of that island, in quality of his physician, and arrived on the 19th December. Here a new field was opened for discoveries in natural productions; but the duke of Albemarle died soon after he landed, and the duchess determined to return to England as soon as possible. As Dr. Sloane could not leave her grace in her distress, whilst the rest of her retinue were preparing for their departure, he improved the interval in making collections of natural curiosities; so that, though his whole stay at Jamaica was not above fifteen months, he brought together such a prodigious number of plants, that, on his return to England, Mr. Ray was astonished that one man could procure, in so short a space, so vast a variety. On his arrival in London he applied himself to the practice of his profession; and soon became so eminent that he was chosen physician to Christ's Hospital on the 17th October 1694; and this office he held till 1730, when, on account of his great age, he resigned it. He constantly applied the money he received for his trouble to the relief of those who were the greatest objects of compassion in the hospital. He had been elected secretary to the Royal Society on the 30th of November 1693; and upon this occasion he revived the publication of the Philosophical Transactions, which nad been omitted for some time. He continued to be the editor of this work till 1712; and the volumes which appeared during that period are monuments of his industry and ingenuity, many of the pieces in them being written by himself. In the mean time he published Catalogus Plantarum quæ in Insula Jamaica sponte prove

niunt, &c., seu Prodromi Historia Naturalis pars prima, which he dedicated to the Royal Society and College of Physicians. In the statistical part of this book are some remarks relative to the management of the slaves of the island which we cannot pass over, especially as the question of the slave trade still calls for all the vigilance of the Christian moralist. The following, amongst others, are Sloane's words :-The punishments for crimes of slaves are usually for rebellions, burning them, by nailing them down on the ground with crooked sticks on every limb, and then applying the fire by degrees from the feet and hands, burning them gradually up to the head, whereby their pains are extravagant. For crimes of a lesser nature, gelding, or chopping off half of the foot with an axe. These punishments are suffered by them with great constancy.' The author proceeds as coolly to describe 'usual' whipping and other punishments, and concludes thus:-After they are whipped till they are raw, some put on their skins pepper and salt to make them smart ; at other times their masters will drop melted wax on their skins, and use several very exquisite torments. These punishments are sometimes merited by the blacks, who are a very perverse generation of people; and, though they appear harsh, yet are scarcely equal to some of their crimes, and inferior to what punishments other European nations inflict on their slaves in the East Indies, as may be seen by Moquet and other travellers.' We put these words on record chiefly to show what a savage man may become to man; and how a benevolent mind, like Sir Hans Sloane's, could be inured to the sight of such enormities and the reasoning of the planters until it approved of them. About the same time he formed the plan of a public dispensary, where the poor might be furnished at prime cost with medicines, which he afterwards carried into execution with the assistance of the College of Physicians. He was continually enriching and enlarging his cabinet of curiosities; and the fame which, in the course of a few years, it had acquired, brought every thing that was curious in art or nature to be first offered to him for purchase. In 1701 it was greatly augmented upon the death of William Courten, esq., who had employed much of his time and fortune in collecting rarities, and who bequeathed the whole to Dr. Sloane on condition of his paying certain debts and legacies with which he had charged it. These terms our author accepted, and he executed the will of the donor with the most scrupulous exactness. About 1706 he became acquainted with the celebrated Sydenham; who contracted so warm an affection for him that he took him into his house, and recommended him to his patients. In 1707 the first volume of his Natural History of Jamaica appeared in folio, though the publication of the second was delayed till 1725. By this very useful and magnificent work the materia medica was enriched with a great number of excellent drugs not before known. In 1708 the doctor was elected a foreign_member of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris; an honor so much the greater as we were then at war with France, and the queen's consent was necessary before he could accept it. In proportion as his

SLOANEA, in botany, the sappodillo tree, a genus of the monogynia order, and polyandria class of plants; natural order fiftieth, amentaceæ: COR. pentapetalous: CAL. pentaphyllous and deciduous; the stigma is perforated; the berry is corticose, echinated, polyspermous, and gaping. There are two species:-1. S. dentata, the sappodillo tree; and 2. S. emarginata, the apeiba of Brasil.

credit rose among the learned his practice in- with it; that he had long expected the stroke creased among the people of rank: queen Anne and that he was prepared to receive it whenever herself frequently consulted him, and in her last the great author of his being should think fit. illness was blooded by him. On the accession After an illness of three days he died on the 11th of George I., that prince, on the 3d of April January 1752, and was interred on the 18th at 1716, created the doctor a baronet, and made him Chelsea, in the same vault with his lady; the sophysician general to the army, in which station lemnity being attended with the greatest conhe continued till 1727, when he was appointed course of people, of all ranks and conditions, that physician in ordinary to George II. He attended had ever been seen on such an occasion. Sir the royal family till his death, and was particu- Hans, being extremely solicitous lest his cabinet larly favored by queen Caroline. In the mean time of curiosities, which he had taken so much pains he had been unanimously chosen one of the elects to collect, should be again dissipated at his death, of the College of Physicians, June 1st, 1716; and being at the same time unwilling that so and he was elected president on September 30th, large a portion of his fortune should be lost to his 1719, an office which he held for sixteen years. children, he bequeathed it to the public, on conDuring that period he not only gave the highest dition that £20,000 should be made good by proofs of his zeal and assiduity in the discharge parliament to his family. This sum, though large of his duty, but in 1721 made a present to that in appearance, was scarcely more than the intrinsociety of £100; and so far remitted a very con- sic value of the gold and silver medals, the ores siderable debt which the corporation owed him and precious stones, that were found in it; for as to accept it in such small sums as were least in his last will he declares that the first cost of inconvenient to the state of their affairs. Sir the whole amounted at least to £50,000. Besides Hans was no less liberal to other learned bodies. his library, consisting of more than 50,000 voHe had no sooner purchased the manor of Chel- lumes, 347 of which were illustrated with cuts sea than he gave the company of apothecaries finely engraven and colored from nature, there the entire freehold of their botanical garden there, were 3560 MSS., and a vast number of rare and upon condition only that they should present curious works of every kind. The parliament yearly to the Royal Society fifty new plants, till accepted the legacy, and fulfilled the conditions. the number should amount to 2000, which was completed in 1761. He gave, besides, several other considerable donations for the improvement of this garden; the situation of which, so near the capital, was such as to render it very useful as an excellent school for young botanists. On the death of Sir Isaac Newton, in 1727, Sir Hans was raised to the presidency of the Royal Society. He made the Society a present of 100 guineas; caused a bust of king Charles II., its founder, to be erected in the great hall where it met; and procured Sir Godfrey Copley's benefaction of a medal, of the value of five guineas, to be annually given as an honorary mark of distinction to the person who communicates the best experiments to the Society. In these and similar exertions for the benefit of that Society he employed his time from 1727 to 1740, when, at the age of eighty, he resigned the presidency, much against the inclination of that respectable body, who, in a public assembly, thanked him for the eminent services he had rendered them. In January 1741 he began to remove his library and his cabinet of rarities from his house in Bloomsbury to that at Chelsea; and on the 12th March following, having settled all his affairs, he retired thither himself, to enjoy in tranquillity the remains of a well-spent life. He did not, however, bury himself in solitude; but, during his retreat, presented to the public such useful remedies as success had warranted, during the course of a long practice. Among these is the efficacious receipt for distempers in the eyes, and his remedy for the bite of a mad dog. During the whole course of his life, Sir Hans had lived with so much temperance as had preserved him from feeling the infirmities of old age; but in his ninetieth year he began to complain of pains, and to be sensible of a universal decay. He often said that the approach of death brought no terrors along

To SLOCKEN is the verb universally used in the Scottish dialect. To SLOCK would hardly be understood.

sla.

SLOE, n. s. Sax. rla; Belgic slaae; Swed.
The fruit of the blackthorn; a small wild

plum.

When you fell your underwoods, sow haws and sloes in them, and they will furnish you, without doing of your woods any hurt. Mortimer's Husbandry. The fair pomegranate might adorn the pine, The grape the bramble, and the stos the vine.

SLOE. See PRUNUS.

Blackmore.

mainsail of which is attached to a gaff above, or A SLOOP is furnished with only one mast, the to the mast on its foremast edge, and to a long boom below, by which it is occasionally shifted to either quarter.

SLOOP OF WAR is a name given to the smallest vessels of war except cutters. They are either rigged as ships or snows.

SLOP, v. a. & n. s. Belg. slob, sleb, mire. To make a puddle; drink grossly or greedily: mean and vile liquor of any kind.

Be thankful.
But thou, whatever slops she will have bought,
Dryden's Juvenal.
The sick husband here wanted for neither slops nor
doctors.
L'Estrange.
SLOP, n. s. Sax. rlop; Belg, sloove, a cover-
ing. Trowsers; open breeches.

What said Mr. Dombledon about the sattin for my short cloak and stops? Shakspeare. Henry IV.

[v. n.

SLOPE, adj., n. s., v. a. &~ 'This word,' SLOPE NESS, n. s. says Dr. JohnSLOPE WISE, adj,. son, is not derived from any SLO'PINGLY, adv. satisfactory original.'. Junius omits it: Skinner derives it from Dutch slap, lax; and derives it from the curve of a loose rope. Perhaps its original may be latent in Dutch loopen, to run; slope being easy to the runner. Thomson refers it to SLIP. Oblique; not perpendicular. Generally used of acclivity or declivity, forming an angle greater or less with the plane of the horizon: the derivatives all corresponding.

Our pious lab'rer passed his youthful days

In peace and charity, in prayer and praise. Harte.

SLOTH, n. s.
SLOTH'FUL, adj.

Sax. rlæp, rlepð; Swed. slott., It might SLOTH FULNESS, N. s.. not improperly be written sloath, but that it seems better to regard the orthography of the primitive slow. Slowness; tardiness; laziness: the adjective and noun substantive following corresponding.

He that is slothful in his work, is brother to him Prov. xviii. 9. that is a great waster. The desire of the slothful killeth him; for his hands Id. xxi. 25. refuse to labour. To trust to labour without prayer, argueth impiety Though bladed corn be lodged, and trees blown and prophaneness; it maketh light of the providence

down, Though palaces and pyramids do slope Their heads to their foundations.

Id. Macbeth.

of God: and, although it be not the intent of a religious mind, yet it is the fault of those men whose religion wanteth light of a mature judgment to direct it, when we join with our prayer slothfulness, and neglect of convenient labour. Bacon.

Where there is greater quantity of water, and space enough, the water moveth with a sloper rise and fall.

Growing upon slopes is caused for that moss, as it cometh of moisture, so the water must but slide, not Id. be in a pool.

The Italians give the cover a graceful pendence of slopeness, dividing the whole breadth into nine parts, whereof two shall serve for the elevation of the Wotton's Architecture. highest ridge.

The Wear is a frith, reaching slopewise through the Ose from the land to low-water mark, and having in it a bent or cod with an eye-hook; where the fish entering, upon their coming back with the ebb, are stopped from issuing out again, forsaken by the waCarew. ter, and left dry on the ose.

These atoms do not descend always perpendicularly, but sometimes slopingly. Digby on the Soul. Murmuring waters fall

Down the slope hills, dispersed, or in a lake,
That to the fringed bank with myrtle crowned
Her crystal mirrour holds, unite their streams.

Milton.

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These cardinals trifle with me: I abhor
This dilatory sloth and tricks of Rome.

Hooker.

Shakspeare. Henry VIII.
False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand,
Id. King Lear.
Hog in sloth, fox in stealth.
They change their course to pleasure, ease, and
Milton.
sloth.

To vice industrious; but to nobler deeds
Timorous and slothful.

Id

Flora commands those nymphs and knights,
Who lived in slothful ease and loose delights,
Who never acts of honour durst pursue,
The men inglorious knights, the ladies all untrue.

Dryden.

The very soul of the slothful does effectually but lie drowsing in his body, and the whole man is toL'Estrange. tally given up to his senses.

The sloth is an animal of so slow a motion that he will be three or four days at least in climbing up and coming down a tree; and to go the length of fifty paces on plain ground requires a whole day. Grew. Industry approached,

And roused him from his miserable sloth. Thomson's Autumn. Another is deaf to all the motives to piety, by inLaw. dulging an idle slothful temper.

SLOT, in the sportsman's language, is used to express the mark of the foot of a stag or other animal proper for the chase in the clay or earth, by which they are able to guess when the animal passed, and which way he went. If the slot be large, deep printed in the ground, and with an open cleft, and if, added to these marks, there is a large space between mark and mark, it is certain that the stag is an old one. If there be the slots or treadings of two, the one long and the other round, and both of one size, the long slot is always that of the large animal. There is also another way of knowing the old ones from the young ones by the treading; which is, that the hinder feet of the old ones never reach to their fore feet, whereas those of the young ones do.

SLOUCH, n.s. Dan. sloff; Swed. slutt, stupid.
A downcast look; depression of the head. In
Scotland, an ungainly gait, as also the person
whose gait it is.

Begin thy carols then, thou vaunting slouch;
Be thine the oaken staff, or mine the pouch. Gay.
Our doctor has every quality that can make a man
useful; but alas! he hath a sort of slouch in his walk.

Swift.

SLOVEN, n. s. Belg. sloef; Welsh yslyvn, SLOVENLY, adv. nasty, shabby. A man negSLOV'ENRY, n. s.ligent of cleanliness; a man dirtily dressed the adverb corresponding : slovenry is dirtiness; negligence of appearance.

The ministers came to church in handsome holiday apparel, and that himself did not think them bound Hooker. by the law of God to go like slovens.

Our gayness and our guilt are all besmirched
With rainy marching in the painful field:
There's not a piece of feather in our host,
And time hath worn us into slovenry.

Shakspeare. Henry V. Slovenliness is the worst sign of a hard student, and civility the best exercise of the remiss; yet not to be exact in the phrase of compliment, or gestures of Wotton.

courtesy.

Affect in things about thee cleanliness, That all may gladly board thee as a flower: Slovens take their stock of noisomeness up Beforehand, and anticipate their last hour. Herbert. Esop at last found out a slovenly lazy fellow, lolling at his ease, as if he had nothing to do.

L'Estrange.

As I hang my clothes on somewhat slovenly, I no sooner went in but he frowned upon me. Pope. You laugh, half beau, half sloven, if I stand; My wig half powder, and all snuff my band. Id. Their methods various, but alike their aim; The sloven and the fopling are the same. Young. SLOUGH, n. s. Į Sax. rlog. A deep miry SLOUGH'Y, adj. place; slimy hole; slimy skin or covering; the part that separates from a foul sore sloughy is boggy; miry.

Thy fates open their hands, let thy blood and spirit embrace them; and, to inure thyself to what thou art like to be, cast thy humble slough, and appear fresh. Shakspeare. Twelfth Night.

When the mind is quickened, The organs, though defunct and dead before, Break up their drowsy grave, and newly move, With casted slough, and fresh legerity. Shakspeare. The Scots were in a fallow field, whereinto the English could not enter, but over a cross ditch and a slough; in passing whereof many of the English horse were plunged, and some mired. Hayward.

The ways being foul, twenty to one

He's here stuck in a slough, and overthrown. Milton.
Oh let not sleep my closing eyes invade

In open plains, or in the secret shade,
When he, renewed in all the speckled pride
Of pompous youth, has cast his slough aside;
And in his summer livery rolls along
Erect, and brandishing his forky tongue. Dryden.
A carter had laid his waggon fast in a slough.

L'Estrange.

The slough of an English viper, that is, the cuticula, they cast off twice every year, at spring and fall the separation begins at the head, and is finished in twenty-four hours. Grew.

The body, which we leave behind in this visible world, is as the womb or slough from whence we issue and are born into the other.

Grew's Cosmologia. That custom should not be allowed of cutting scraws in low grounds sloughy underneath, which turn into bog. Swift.

At the next dressing I found a slough come away with the dressings, which was the sordes.

SLOW, adv., v. a. & adj.
SLOWLY, adv.
SLOW'NESS, n. s.
of motion; not having

Wiseman on Ulcers.

Sax. rlap, rleap; Swed. slo; Goth. slia. Not swift; not quick velocity; late; dull;

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Will prove no sudden but a slow-paced evil, This day's death denounced, if aught I see, A long day's dying to augment our pain.

Id.

of the cæcilia, or slow-worm, yet may the viper emThough we have found formed snakes in the beily phatically bear the name. Browne's Vulgar Errours.

Fixed on defence, the Trojans are not slow To guard their shore from an expected foe. Dryden. Our fathers bent their painful industry To check a monarchy that slowly grew;

But did not France or Holland's fate foresee, Whose rising power to swift dominion flew. Id.

Where the motion is so slow as not to supply a constant train of fresh ideas to the senses, the sense

of motion is lost.

Locke.

The chapel of St. Laurence advances so very slowly that 'tis not impossible but the family of Medicis may be extinct before their burial place is finished.

Addison on Italy. The slow of speech make in dreams unpremeditated harangues, or converse readily in languages that they are but little acquainted with. Addison.

Christ would not heal their infirmities, because of the hardness and slowness of their hearts, in that they believed him not. Bentley's Sermons. Spreads his black wings, and slowly mounts to day. The gnome rejoicing bears her gift away,

The politick and wise

Pope.

Id.

Are sly slow things with circumspective eyes.
For eight slow-circling years by tempests tost. Id.
Motion is the absolute mode of a body, but swift-
ness or slowness are relative ideas.
Watts.
From lubber,

SLUB'BER, v. a.

Slubberdegul'lION, n. s. ) or Belgic slobberen or slabben. Bedaub; sully; to do any thing lazily, or with idle hurry: slubberdegullion is a Hudibrastic word for a sorry dirty wretch.

Nature shewed she doth not like men who slubber Sidney.

up matters of mean account.

You must be content to slubber the gloss of your new fortunes with this more stubborn and boisterous expedition. Shakspeare.

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Faerie Queene.

Id.

Sluggish idleness, the nurse of sin, Upon a slothful ass he chose to ride. He lay not all night slugging in a cabin under his mantle, but used commonly to keep others waking to defend their lives. Spenser

The dull billows, thick as troubled mire, Whom neither wind out of their seat could force, Nor tides did drive out of their sluggish source. Id. Fie! what a slug is Hastings, that he comes not! Shakspeare.

Cry mercy, lords, and watchful gentlemen, That you have taken a tardy sluggard here.

Id. Richard III. Rather see the wonders of the world abroad, Than, living dully sluggardized at home, Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness.

Shakspeare.

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Shakspeare.

Milton. Id.

Divine Alpheus, who, by secret sluice, Stole under seas to meet his Arethuse. Veins of liquid ore sluiced from the lake. If we receive them all, they were more than seven ; If only the natural sluices, they were fewer. Browne's Vulgar Errours. You wrong me, if think I'll sell one drop, Within these veins for pageants; but let honour Call for my blood, I'll sluice it into streams; Turn fortune loose again to my pursuit, And let me hunt her through her embattled foes, In dusty plains; there will I be the first.

you

Dryden's Spanish Fryar.

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A SLUICE is a frame of timber, stone, or other matter, serving to retain and raise the water of a river, &c., and on occasion to let it pass. Such is the sluice of a mill, which stops and collects the water of a rivulet, &c., to let it fall at length in the greater plenty upon the mill wheel; such also are those used as vents or drains to discharge water off land. And such are the sluices of Flanders, &c., which serve to prevent the waters of the sea from overflowing the lower lands. Sometimes there is a kind of canal enclosed between two gates or sluices, in artificial navigations, to save the water, and render the passage of boats equally easy and safe, upwards and downwards, as in the sluices of Briare in France, which are a kind of massive walls, built parallel to each other, at the distance of twenty or twenty. four feet, closed with strong gates at each end, between which is a kind of canal or chamber, considerably longer than broad; wherein a vessel being enclosed, the water is let out at the first gate, by which the vessel is raised fifteen or sixteen feet, and passed out of this canal into another much higher. By such means a boat is conveyed out of the Loire into the Seine, though the ground between them rise above 150 feet higher than either of those rivers. See CANAL. Sluices are made different ways, according to the use for which they are intended; when they

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