This article explores the complexities of James Petiver and Hans Sloane's relationship with one another and their shared contacts, examining the ways in which their networks overlapped but also, crucially, differed from one another. It shows that, though they had common interests and institutional memberships, Petiver ultimately occupied a different urban world from Sloane, a middling, trade-orientated stratum of society with its own forms of sociability and business, credit and advancement. It was this position that helped Petiver bridge a range of gaps in elite scholarly exchange, making himself indispensable through his effective mediation between different urban groups and access to spaces beyond Sloane's reach. It argues that greater attention needs to be paid to the imbrication of middling interests and agencies that operated across London's natural history communities, in order to prompt us to think more carefully about the strategies and interests of those who tried to navigate them.

本文探讨了詹姆斯·佩蒂弗（James Petiver）和汉斯·斯隆（Hans Sloane）彼此之间的关系以及他们共同的联系的复杂性，研究了他们的网络重叠但又至关重要的是彼此不同的方式。它表明，尽管他们具有共同的利益和机构成员身份，但Petiver最终占领了一个与斯隆不同的城市世界，斯隆是一个中等社会，以贸易为导向的社会阶层，具有自己的社交和商业，信用与进步形式。正是这一职位帮助Petiver弥合了精英学者交流中的一系列空白，通过他在不同城市群体之间的有效调解以及对Sloane所无法企及的空间的访问，使自己不可或缺。