Benjamin Franklin; Self-Revealed Volume I Part 17

Dr. Evans' idea of establis.h.i.+ng a medical library at the Hospital was so grateful to Franklin's untiring public spirit that, as soon as he heard of it from Dr. Evans, he sent him at once the only medical book that he had, and took steps to solicit other donations of such books for the purpose in England. There are some instructive observations on political and medical subjects in his earlier letters to Dr. Evans, but his later ones are mainly given over to the movement for the production of silk in Pennsylvania in which Dr. Evans was deeply interested. The industry, intelligence and enthusiasm with which Franklin seconded his efforts to make the exotic nursling a success is one of the many laudable things in his career.

Another close friend of Franklin was Abel James, a Quaker, and an active member of the society in Pennsylvania for the manufacture of silk, or the Filature, as it was called. When he returned to England in 1764, Abel James, Thomas Wharton and Joseph Galloway were the friends who were so loath to part with him that they even boarded his s.h.i.+p at Chester, and accompanied him as far as New Castle. The enduring claim of James upon the attention of posterity consists in the fact that he was so lucky, when the books and papers, entrusted by Franklin to the care of Joseph Galloway were raided, as to recover the ma.n.u.script of the first twenty-three pages of the _Autobiography_, which brought the life of Franklin down to the year 1730.

Subsequently he sent a copy to "his dear and honored friend," with a letter urging him to complete the work. "What will the world say," he asked, "if kind, humane and benevolent Ben. Franklin should leave his friends and the world deprived of so pleasing and profitable a work; a work which would be useful and entertaining not only to a few, but to millions?"

The names of Thomas Wharton and Samuel Wharton, two Philadelphia friends of Franklin, are more than once coupled together in Franklin's letters. Thomas Wharton was a partner of Galloway and G.o.ddard in the establishment of the _Philadelphia Chronicle_. It was his woollen gown that Franklin found such a comfortable companion on his winter voyage. He would seem to have been the same kind of robust invalid as the neurasthenic who insisted that he was dying of consumption until he grew so stout that he had to refer his imaginary ill-health to dropsy.

Our friend W---- [Franklin wrote to Dr. Evans], who is always complaining of a constant fever, looks nevertheless fresh and jolly, and does not fall away in the least. He was saying the other day at Richmond, (where we were together dining with Governor Pownall) that he had been pestered with a fever almost continually for these three years past, and that it gave way to no medicines, all he had taken, advised by different physicians, having never any effect towards removing it. On which I asked him, if it was not now time to inquire, whether he had really any fever at all. He is indeed the only instance I ever knew, of a man's growing fat upon a fever.

It was with the a.s.sistance of Thomas Wharton that Thomas Livezy, a Pennsylvania Quaker, sent Franklin a dozen bottles of wine, made of the "small wild grape" of America, accompanied by a letter, which Franklin with his _penchant_ for good stories, must have enjoyed even more than the wine.

Referring to the plan of converting the government of Pennsylvania from a Proprietary into a Royal one, Livezy wrote that, if it was true that there would be no change until the death of Thomas Penn, he did not know but that some people in the Province would be in the same condition as a German's wife in his neighborhood lately was "who said n.o.body could say she wished her husband dead, but said, she wished she could see how he would look when he was dead." "I honestly confess," Livezy went on to say, "I do not wish him (Penn) to die against his will, but, if he could be prevailed on to die for the good of the people, it might perhaps make his name as immortal as Samson's death did his, and gain him more applause here than all the acts which he has ever done in his life."

The humor of Franklin's reply, if humor it can be termed, was more sardonic.

The Partizans of the present [he said] may as you say flatter themselves that such Change will not take place, till the Proprietor's death, but I imagine he hardly thinks so himself. Anxiety and uneasiness are painted on his brow and the woman who would like to see how he would look when dead, need only look at him while living.

With Samuel Wharton, Franklin was intimate enough to soothe his gout-ridden feet with a pair of "Gouty Shoes" given or lent to him by Wharton. This Wharton was with him one of the chief promoters of the Ohio settlement, of which the reader will learn more later, and the project was brought near enough to success by Franklin for his over-zealous friends to sow the seeds of what might have been a misunderstanding between him and Wharton, if Franklin had not been so healthy-minded, by claiming that the credit for the prospective success of the project would belong to Wharton rather than to Franklin. But, as Franklin said, many things happen between the cup and the lip, and enough happened in this case to make the issue a wholly vain one. Subsequently we know that Franklin in one letter asked John Paul Jones to remember him affectionately to Wharton and in another referred to Wharton as a "particular friend of his." His feelings, it is needless to say, underwent a decided change when later the fact was brought to his attention that Wharton had converted to his own use a sum of money placed in his hands by Jan Ingenhousz, one of the most highly-prized of all Franklin's friends.

There is a thrust at Parliament in a letter from Franklin to Samuel Wharton, written at Pa.s.sy, which is too keen not to be recalled. He is describing the Lord George Gordon riots, during which Lord Mansfield's house was destroyed.

If they had done no other Mischief [said Franklin], I would have more easily excused them, as he has been an eminent Promoter of the American War, and it is not amiss that those who have approved the Burning our poor People's Houses and Towns should taste a little of the Effects of Fire themselves. But they turn'd all the Thieves and Robbers out of Newgate to the Number of three hundred, and instead of replacing them with an equal Number of other Plunderers of the Publick, which they might easily have found among the Members of Parliament, they burnt the Building.

The relations between Franklin and Ebenezer Kinnersley, who shared his enthusiasm for electrical experiments, John Foxcroft, who became his colleague, as Deputy Postmaster-General for America after the death of Colonel Hunter, and the Rev. Thomas Coombe, the a.s.sistant minister of Christ Church and St. Peter's in Philadelphia, were of an affectionate nature, but there is little of salient interest to be said about these relations. Malice has a.s.serted that Franklin did not give Kinnersley due credit for ideas that he borrowed from him in his electrical experiments.

If so, Kinnersley must have had a relish for harsh treatment, for in a letter to Franklin, when speaking of the lightning rod, he exclaimed, "May it extend to the latest posterity of mankind, and make the name of FRANKLIN like that of NEWTON _immortal_!"

James Wright, and his sister, Susannah Wright, who resided at Hempfield, near Wright's Ferry, Pennsylvania, were likewise good friends of Franklin.

Part at any rate of the flour, on which Braddock's army subsisted, was supplied by a mill erected by James Wright near the mouth of the Shawanese Run. Susannah Wright was a woman of parts, interested in silk culture, and fond of reading. On one occasion, Franklin sends her from Philadelphia a couple of pamphlets refuting the charges of plagiarism preferred by William Lauder against the memory of Milton and a book or tract ent.i.tled _Christianity not Founded on Argument_. On another occasion, in a letter from London to Deborah, he mentions, as part of the contents of a box that he was transmitting to America, some pamphlets for the Speaker and "Susy"

Wright. Another gift to her was a specimen of a new kind of candles, "very convenient to read by." She would find, he said, that they afforded a clear white light, might be held in the hand even in hot weather without softening, did not make grease spots with their drops like those made by common candles, and lasted much longer, and needed little or no snuffing.

A sentiment of cordial friends.h.i.+p also existed between Franklin and Anthony Benezet, a Philadelphia Quaker, born in France, who labored throughout his life with untiring zeal for the abolition of the Slave Trade. This trade, in the opinion of Franklin, not only disgraced the Colonies, but, without producing any equivalent benefit, was dangerous to their very existence. When actually engaged in business, as a printer, no less than two books, aimed at the abolition of Slavery, one by Ralph Sandyford, and the other by Benjamin Lay, both Quakers, were published by him. The fact that Sandyford's book was published before 1730 and Lay's as early as 1736, led Franklin to say in a letter to a friend in 1789, when the feeling against Slavery was much more widespread, that the headway, which it had obtained, was some confirmation of Lord Bacon's observation that a good motion never dies--the same reflection, by the way, with which he consoled himself when his abridgment of the Book of Common Prayer fell still-born.

When Franklin took a friend to his bosom, it was usually, as he took Deborah, for life. But Joseph Galloway, one of his Philadelphia friends, was an exception to this rule. When Galloway decided to cast his lot with the Loyalists, after Franklin, in a feeling letter to him, had painted their "rising country" in auroral colors, Franklin simply let him lapse into the general ma.s.s of detested Tories. Previously, his letters to Galloway, while attended with but few personal details, had been of a character to indicate that he not only entertained a very high estimate of Galloway's abilities but cherished for him the warmest feeling of affection. Indeed, in a.s.suring Galloway of this affection, he sometimes used a term as strong as "unalterable." When Galloway at the age of forty thought of retiring from public life, Franklin told him that it would be in his opinion something criminal to bury in private retirement so early all the usefulness of so much experience and such great abilities. Several years before he had written to Cadwallader Evans that he did not see that Galloway could be spared from the a.s.sembly without great detriment to their affairs and to the general welfare of America. Among the most valuable of his letters, are his letters to Galloway on political conditions in England when the latter was the Speaker of the Pennsylvania a.s.sembly. In one he expresses the hope that a few months would bring them together, and hazards the belief that, in the calm retirement of Trevose, Galloway's country place, they might perhaps spend some hours usefully in conversation over the proper const.i.tution for the American Colonies. When Franklin learned from his son that hints had reached the latter that Galloway's friends.h.i.+p for Franklin had been chilled by the fear that he and Franklin would be rivals for the same office, Franklin replied by stating that, if this office would be agreeable to Galloway, he heartily wished it for him.

No insinuations of the kind you mention [he said], concerning Mr. G.,--have reached me, and, if they had, it would have been without the least effect; as I have always had the strongest reliance on the steadiness of his friends.h.i.+p, and on the best grounds, the knowledge I have of his integrity, and the often repeated disinterested services he has rendered me.

In another letter to his son, he said, "I cast my eye over G.o.ddard's Piece against our friend Mr. Galloway, and then lit my Fire with it."

The shadow of the approaching cloud is first noticed in a letter to Galloway in 1775, in which Franklin asks him for permission to hint to him that it was whispered in London by ministerial people that he and Mr. Jay of New York were friends to their measures, and gave them private intelligence of the views of the Popular Party. While at Pa.s.sy, Franklin informed the Congressional Committee on Foreign Affairs that General and Lord Howe, Generals Cornwallis and Grey and other British officers had formally given it as their opinion in Parliament that the conquest of America was impracticable, and that Galloway and other American Loyalists were to be examined that week to prove the contrary. "One would think the first Set were likely to be the best Judges," he adds with acidulous brevity. Later on, he did not dispose of Galloway so concisely. In a letter to Richard Bache, after suggesting that some of his missing letter books might be recovered by inquiry in the vicinity of Galloway's country seat, he says, smarting partly under the loss of his letter books, and partly under the deception that Galloway had practised upon him:

I should not have left them in his Hands, if he had not deceiv'd me, by saying, that, though he was before otherwise inclin'd, yet that, since the King had declar'd us out of his Protection, and the Parliament by an Act had made our Properties Plunder, he would go as far in the Defence of his Country as any man; and accordingly he had lately with Pleasure given Colours to a Regiment of Militia, and an Entertainment to 400 of them before his House. I thought he was become a stanch Friend to the glorious Cause. I was mistaken. As he was a Friend of my Son's, to whom in my Will I had Left all my Books and Papers, I made him one of my Executors, and put the Trunk of Papers into his Hands, imagining them safer in his House (which was out of the way of any probable March of the enemies' Troops) than in my own.

The correspondence between Franklin and Galloway is enlivened by only a single gleam of Franklin's humor. This was kindled by the protracted uncertainty which attended the application of his a.s.sociates and himself to the British Crown for the Ohio grant.

The Affair of the Grant [Franklin wrote to Galloway]

goes on but slowly. I do not yet clearly see Land. I begin to be a little of the Sailor's Mind when they were handing a Cable out of a Store into a s.h.i.+p, and one of 'em said: "Tis a long, heavy Cable. I wish we could see the End of it." "D--n me," says another, "if I believe it has any End; somebody has cut it off."[33]

James Logan, the accomplished Quaker scholar, David Hall, Franklin's business partner, and Charles Thomson, the Secretary of Congress, were other residents of Pennsylvania, with whom Franklin was connected by ties of friends.h.i.+p, and we shall have occasion to speak of them again when we come to his business and political career. "You will give an old man leave to say, My Love to Mrs. Thompson," was a closing sentence in one of his letters to Charles Thomson.

David Rittenhouse, of Philadelphia, the celebrated astronomer was also a dear friend of his.

Of his New York friends, John Jay was the one, of whom he was fondest, and this friends.h.i.+p included the whole of Jay's family. In a letter from Pa.s.sy to Jay, shortly after Jay arrived at Madrid, as our minister plenipotentiary to Spain, he tells him that he sends for Mrs. Jay at her request a print of himself.

The Verses at the bottom [he wrote] are truly extravagant. But you must know, that the Desire of pleasing, by a perpetual rise of Compliments in this polite Nation, has so us'd up all the common Expressions of Approbation, that they are become flat and insipid, and to use them almost implies Censure.

Hence Musick, that formerly might be sufficiently prais'd when it was called _bonne_, to go a little farther they call'd it _excellente_, _then superbe_, _magnifique_, _exquise_, celeste, all which being in their turns worn out, there only remains _divine_; and, when that is grown as insignificant as its Predecessors, I think they must return to common Speech and common Sense; as from vying with one another in fine and costly Paintings on their Coaches, since I first knew the Country, not being able to go farther in that Way, they have returned lately to plain Carriages, painted without Arms or Figures, in one uniform Colour.

In a subsequent letter, Franklin informs Jay that, through the a.s.sistance of the French Court, he is in a position to honor the drafts of Jay to the extent of $25,000. "If you find any Inclination to hug me for the good News of this Letter," he concluded, "I const.i.tute and appoint Mrs. Jay my Attorney, to receive in my Behalf your embraces."

Afterwards Jay was appointed one of our Commissioners to negotiate the treaty of peace with Great Britain, and he and his family settled down under the same roof with Franklin at Pa.s.sy. The result was a mutual feeling of attachment, so strong that when Jay returned to America Franklin could write to him of a kind letter that he had received from him: "It gave me Pleasure on two Accounts; as it inform'd me of the public Welfare, and that of your, I may almost say _our_ dear little Family; for, since I had the Pleasure of their being with me in the same House, I have ever felt a tender Affection for them, equal I believe to that of most Fathers." In other letters to Jay, there are repeated references by Franklin to the child of Jay mentioned above whose singular attachment to him, he said, he would always remember. "Embrace my little Friend for me," he wrote to Jay and his wife, when he was wis.h.i.+ng them a prosperous return voyage to America, and, in a later letter, after his own return to America, to the same pair, he said he was so well as to think it possible that he might once more have the pleasure of seeing them both at New York, with his dear young friend, who, he hoped, might not have quite forgotten him.

Beyond the Harlem River, his friends were only less numerous than they were in Pennsylvania. Among the most conspicuous were Josiah Quincy, John Winthrop, Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard College, and Dr. Samuel Cooper, the celebrated clergyman and patriot. We mention these three Boston friends of his first because they were feelingly grouped in a letter that he wrote to James Bowdoin, another valued Boston friend of his, towards the close of his life. In this letter, he tells Bowdoin that it had given him great pleasure to receive his kind letter, as it proved that all his friends in Boston were not estranged from him by the malevolent misrepresentations of his conduct that had been circulated there, but that one of the most esteemed still retained a regard for him.

"Indeed," Franklin said, "you are now almost the only one left me by nature; Death having, since we were last together, depriv'd me of my dear Cooper, Winthrop, and Quincy." Winthrop, he had said, in an earlier letter to Dr. Cooper, was one of the old friends for the sake of whose society he wished to return from France and spend the small remnant of his days in New England. The friends.h.i.+p between Quincy and Franklin began when Franklin was a member of the Pennsylvania a.s.sembly, and had its origin in the sum of ten thousand pounds, which Quincy, as the agent of the Colony of Ma.s.sachusetts, obtained through the a.s.sistance of Franklin from the Colony of Pennsylvania for the military needs of the former colony. Quincy, Franklin said in the _Autobiography_, returned thanks to the a.s.sembly in a handsome memorial, went home highly pleased with the success of his emba.s.sy, and ever after bore for him the most cordial and affectionate friends.h.i.+p.

For Quincy's highly promising son, Josiah, who died at sea at the early age of thirty-five, Franklin formed a warm regard when Josiah came over to London during the second mission of Franklin to England. To the father he wrote of the son in terms that were doubtless deeply gratifying to him, and, in a letter to James Bowdoin, he said: "I am much pleased with Mr.

Quincy. It is a thousand pities his strength of body is not equal to his strength of mind. His zeal for the public, like that of David for G.o.d's house, will, I fear, eat him up." Later, when the younger Quincy's zeal had actually consumed him, Franklin wrote to the elder Quincy:

The epitaph on my dear and much esteemed young Friend, is too well written to be capable of Improvement by any Corrections of mine. Your Moderation appears in it, since the natural affection of a Parent has not induced you to exaggerate his Virtues. I shall always mourn his Loss with you; a Loss not easily made up to his Country.

And then, referring to some of the falsehoods in circulation about his own conduct as Commissioner, he exclaimed: "How differently const.i.tuted was his n.o.ble and generous Mind from that of the miserable Calumniators you mention! Having Plenty of Merit in himself, he was not jealous of the Appearance of Merit in others, but did Justice to their Characters with as much Pleasure as these People do Injury."

When he sat down at Saratoga to write to a few friends by way of farewell, fearing that the mission to Canada at his time of life would prove too much for him, Quincy was the first of his New England friends to whom he sent an adieu.

To Dr. Samuel Cooper, Franklin wrote some of the most valuable of all his political letters, but the correspondence between them is marked by few details of a personal or social nature. It was upon the recommendation of Franklin that the degree of Doctor of Divinity was conferred upon Cooper by the University of Edinburgh. "The Part I took in the Application for your Degree," he wrote to Dr. Cooper, "was merely doing justice to Merit, which is the Duty of an honest Man whenever he has the Opportunity." That Dr.

Cooper was duly grateful, we may infer, among other things, from a letter in which Franklin tells his sister Jane that he is obliged to good Dr.

Cooper for his prayers. That he was able to hold his own even with such a skilful dispenser of compliments as Franklin himself we may readily believe after reading the letter to Franklin in which he used these words: "You once told me in a letter, as you were going to France, the public had had the eating your flesh and seemed resolved to pick your bones--we all agree the nearer the bone the sweeter the meat." It was to Dr. Cooper that Franklin expressed the hope that America would never deserve the reproof administered to an enthusiastical knave in Pennsylvania, who, when asked by his creditor to give him a bond and pay him interest, replied:

No, I cannot do that; I cannot in conscience either receive or pay Interest, it is against my Principle.

You have then the Conscience of a Rogue, says the Creditor: You tell me it is against your Principle to pay Interest; and it being against your Interest to pay the Princ.i.p.al, I perceive you do not intend to pay me either one or t'other.

The letters of Franklin to James Bowdoin are full of interest, but the interest is scientific.

Another Boston friend of Franklin was Mather Byles. In a letter to him, Franklin expresses his pleasure at learning that the lives of Byles and his daughters had been protected by his "points," and his regret that electricity had not really proved what it was at first supposed to be--a cure for the palsy.

It is however happy for you [Franklin said], that, when Old Age and that Malady have concurr'd to infeeble you, and to disable you for Writing, you have a Daughter at hand to nurse you with filial Attention, and to be your Secretary, of which I see she is very capable, by the Elegance and Correctness of her Writing in the Letter I am now answering.

Other letters from Franklin to Byles have unhappily perished. This fact is brought to our knowledge by a letter from him to Elizabeth Partridge, which shows that even the famous letter to her, in which he spoke of the end of his brother as if he had gone off quietly from a party of pleasure in a sedan chair, led for a time a precarious existence. If this was the letter, he said, of which she desired a copy, he fancied that she might possibly find it in Boston, as Dr. Byles once wrote to him that many copies had been taken of it. Then follows this playful and characteristic touch. "I too, should have been glad to have seen that again, among others I had written to him and you. But you inform me they were eaten by the Mice. Poor little innocent Creatures, I am sorry they had no better Food. But since they like my Letters, here is another Treat for them."

Another Ma.s.sachusetts friend of Franklin was Samuel Danforth, the President of its Colonial Council. "It gave me great pleasure," Franklin wrote to this friend on one occasion, "to receive so chearful an Epistle from a Friend of half a Century's Standing, and to see him commencing Life anew in so valuable a Son." When this letter was written, Franklin was in his sixty-eighth year, but how far he was from being sated with the joy of living other pa.s.sages in it clearly manifest.

I hope [he said] for the great Pleasure of once more seeing and conversing with you: And tho' living-on in one's Children, as we both may do, is a good thing, I cannot but fancy it might be better to continue living ourselves at the same time. I rejoice, therefore, in your kind Intentions of including me in the Benefits of that inestimable Stone, which, curing all Diseases (even old Age itself) will enable us to see the future glorious state of our America, enjoying in full security her own Liberties, and offering in her Bosom a Partic.i.p.ation of them to all the oppress'd of other Nations. I antic.i.p.ate the jolly Conversation we and twenty more of our Friends may have 100 Years hence on this subject, over that well replenish'd Bowl at Cambridge Commencement.

In Connecticut, too, Franklin had some highly prized friends. Among them were Jared Eliot, the grandson of Apostle Eliot, and the author of an essay upon _Field Husbandry in New England_, Ezra Stiles, President of Yale College, Dr. Samuel Johnson and Jared Ingersoll. The letters from Franklin to Eliot are a charming _melange_ of what is now known as Popular Science and Agriculture. To Franklin there was philosophy even in the roasting of an egg, and for agriculture he had the partiality which no one, so close to all the pulsations of nature as he was, can fail to entertain. When he heard from his friend Mrs. Catherine Greene that her son Ray was "smart in the farming way," he wrote to her, "I think agriculture the most honourable of all employments, being the most independent. The farmer has no need of popular favour, nor the favour of the great; the success of his crops depending only on the blessing of G.o.d upon his honest industry." Franklin, of course, was writing before the day of the trust, the high protective tariff, the San Jose scale and the boll weevil.

In one letter to Eliot he gossips delightfully upon such diverse topics as the price of linseed oil, the kind of land on which Pennsylvania hemp was raised, the recent weather, northeast storms, the origin of springs, sea-sh.e.l.l strata and import duties. Something is also said in the letter about gra.s.s seed, and it is curious to note that apparently Franklin was not aware that in parts of New England timothy has always been known as herd's-gra.s.s. And this reminds us that he repeatedly in his later life protested against the use in New England of the word "improve" in the sense of "employ" as a barbarous innovation, when in point of fact the word had been used in that sense in a lampoon in the _Courant_, when that lively sheet was being published under his youthful management. In another letter, written probably in the year 1749, Franklin tells Eliot that he had purchased some eighteen months before about three hundred acres of land near Burlington, and was resolved to improve it in the best and speediest manner. "My fortune, (thank G.o.d)," he said, "is such that I can enjoy all the necessaries and many of the Indulgences of Life; but I think that in Duty to my children I ought so to manage, that the profits of my Farm may Balance the loss my Income will Suffer by my retreat to it." He then proceeds to narrate to Eliot what he had done to secure this result; how he had scoured up the ditches and drains in one meadow, reduced it to an arable condition, and reaped a good crop of oat fodder from it, and how he had then immediately ploughed the meadow again and harrowed it, and sowed it with different kinds of gra.s.s seed. "Take the whole together," he said with decided satisfaction, "it is well-matted, and looks like a green corn-field." He next tells how he drained a round pond of twelve acres, and seeded the soil previously covered by it, too. Even in such modest operations as these the quick observation and precise standards of a man, who was perhaps first of all a man of science, are apparent. He noted that the red clover came up in four days and the herd's-gra.s.s in six days, that the herd's-gra.s.s was less sensitive to frost than the red clover, and that the thicker gra.s.s seed is sown the less injured by the frost the young gra.s.s is apt to be. By actual experiment, he found that a bushel of clean chaff of timothy or salem gra.s.s seed would yield five quarts of seed. In another letter to Eliot he has a word to say about the Schuyler copper mine in New Jersey (the only valuable copper mine in America that he knew of) which yielded good copper and turned out vast wealth to its owners. And then there is a ray from the splendor in which the lordly Schuylers lived in this bit of descriptive detail:

Col. John Schuyler, one of the owners, has a deer park five miles round, fenced with cedar logs, five logs high, with blocks of wood between. It contains a variety of land, high and low, woodland and clear.

There are a great many deer in it; and he expects in a few years to be able to kill two hundred head a year, which will be a very profitable thing. He has likewise six hundred acres of meadow, all within bank.

The fact that Col. John Schuyler had six hundred acres of meadow land within bank was not lost on Eliot; for later Franklin writes to him again promising to obtain from Colonel Schuyler a particular account of the method pursued by him in improving this land. "In return," said Franklin, "(for you know there is no Trade without Returns) I request you to procure for me a particular Acct of the manner of making a new kind of Fence we saw at Southhold, on Long Island, which consists of a Bank and Hedge." With the exact.i.tude of an experimental philosopher, he then details the precise particulars that he desired, disclosing in doing so the fact that Pennsylvania was beginning in many places to be at a loss for wood to fence with. This statement need not surprise the reader, for in his _Account of the New-Invented Pennsylvanian Fireplaces_, published some six years before, Franklin informs us that wood, at that time the common fuel, which could be formerly obtained at every man's door, had then to be fetched near one hundred miles to some towns, and made a very considerable article in the expense of families. From this same essay, we learn that it was deemed uncertain by Franklin whether "Pit-Coal" would ever be discovered in Pennsylvania! In another letter from Franklin to Eliot, along with some items about Peter Collinson, "a most benevolent, worthy man, very curious in botany and other branches of natural history, and fond of improvements in agriculture, &c.," Hugh Roberts' high opinion of Eliot's "Pieces,"

ditching, the Academy, barometers, thermometers and hygrometers, Franklin has some sprightly observations to make upon the love of praise. Rarely, we venture to say, have more winning arguments ever been urged for the reversal of the world's judgment upon any point.