FOOTNOTE:

[14] This epitaph first appeared in a Boston news-paper established and printed by Dr. Franklin. E.

LETTERS AND PAPERS

ON

ELECTRICITY.

It may not be improper to present the reader with the following extract from the preface to the first edition of Dr. Franklin's papers on electricity, which, as we have stated in the advertisement, formed a pamphlet only.

"The following observations and experiments were not drawn up with a view to their being made public, but were communicated at different times, and most of them in letters, written on various topics, as matters only of private amusement.

"But some persons, to whom they were read, and who had themselves been conversant in electrical disquisitions, were of opinion, they contained so many curious and interesting particulars relative to this affair, that it would be doing a kind of injustice to the public, to confine them solely to the limits of a private acquaintance.

"The editor was therefore prevailed upon to commit such extracts of letters and other detached pieces as were in his hands to the press, without waiting for the ingenious author's permission so to do; and this was done with the less hesitation, as it was apprehended the author's engagements in other affairs would scarce afford him leisure to give the public his reflections and experiments on the subject, finished with that care and precision, of which the treatise before us shows he is alike studious and capable."

With respect to the general merit and originality of the experiments and hypothesis of Dr. Franklin, as described and explained in these letters, the following is the testimony of one of the first natural philosophers of his age—the late Dr. Priestly, in his History of Electricity.

"Nothing was ever written upon the subject of electricity which was more generally read and admired in all parts of Europe than these letters. There is hardly any European language into which they have not been translated; and, as if this were not sufficient to make them properly known, a translation of them has lately been made into Latin. It is not easy to say, whether we are most pleased with the simplicity and perspicuity with which these letters are written, the modesty with which the author proposes every hypothesis of his own, or the noble frankness with which he relates his mistakes, when they were corrected by subsequent experiments.

"Though the English have not been backward in acknowledging the great merit of this philosopher, he has had the singular good fortune to be, perhaps, even more celebrated abroad than at home; so that, to form a just idea of the great and deserved reputation of Dr. Franklin, we must read the foreign publications on the subject of electricity; in many of which the terms Franklinism, Franklinist, and the Franklinian system, occur in almost every page. In consequence of this, Dr. Franklin's principles bid fair to be handed down to posterity as equally expressive of the true principles of electricity, as the Newtonian philosophy is of the true system of nature in general."