1. Voices Calling for Reform: The Royal Society in the Mid-Eighteenth Century — Martin Folkes, John Hill, and William Stukeley
2. Andrew Ducarel to da Costa, 24 August 1752, in Nichols John, Illustrations of the literary history of the eighteenth century. Consisting of authentic memoirs and original letters of eminent persons (8 vols, London, 1822–28), ii, 608. It is not known what these complimentary “handsome things” were, yet da Costa certainly had his detractors inside the Royal Society soon after his election, although by 1752 he was clearly at the centre of a critical wing of naturalists within the Society. Early that year (1752) James Parsons intended to contend the Secretaryship and wrote to da Costa requesting him to solicit support among “our forces”; see BL Add MS 28540 f. 183. The general charge against da Costa was that he was greedy, untrustworthy, importunate, and interfered in areas (especially elections) where he had no concern; specifically, that he was mean with his money and time and routinely sent correspondents inferior specimens: Itself a type of swindle more difficult to prove and punish than the crime for which he eventually was imprisoned. To what degree all this early criticism was fair versus prejudiced, and how an image of da Costa developed and was sustained from the 1750s forward, forms part of the purpose of this study.
3. Peter Ascanius to Linnaeus, 7 April 1755, quoted in Smith James Edward, A selection of the correspondence of Linnaeus, and other naturalists, from the original manuscripts (London, 1821), 482–3, translation from Latin original. The friend was probably John Fothergill; see below.