ABSTRACT
Two letters from Thomas Salmon shed a final light on his relationship with the Royal Society, and on where he believed his musical work might take him after the performance before the Fellows. Both are addressed to Hans Sloane, the First Secretary of the Royal Society since 1695; they appear in the British Library, MS Sloane 4040, fols 103-4 and 108-9, and bear the dates 4 December 1705 and 8 January 1706. Salmon must presumably have met Sloane when he appeared at the Royal Society earlier in 1705, and his paper in the Transactions was, at least as printed, addressed to Sloane. These letters, then, are a fragment from at least a slightly larger correspondence, and part of their interest is that they show Salmon asking for help in finding a patron, suggesting that neither Sloane himself nor Isaac Newton in Salmon's view, likely to provide assistance of the kind and on the scale which was now required.
