being sent over to England for the King's approval, the Penns petitioned for a veto on them; and the whole question being brought before the Board of Trade, was at length decided in June, 1760, Franklin having been detained some three years in the prosecution of his mission. By this decision the right of the Assembly to tax the proprietary estates was admitted, and their suit, so far as related to the main point of the controversy, was triumphantly terminated. The Board of Trade, however, in their decision, commented in severe terms on an inferred collusion between the Assembly and Governor Denny, evinced by a grant to the latter of a distinct sum of money for consenting to the several acts objected to by the Proprietaries. Some modifications of the act taxing the Proprietaries were also required; and, as these were not important, Franklin readily concurred in them, and the controversy for the time was settled, much to his reputation as a prudent and faithful negotiator. The powerful influence of Lord Mansfield had been given in favor of the Assembly's demand that the lands of the Proprietaries should be taxed.

The war with France, in which Great Britain was at this time involved, occupied much of Franklin's concern, and he was, at an early period, convinced of the policy of changing the theatre of hostilities from Europe to Canada. His views on this subject were drawn from him by Messrs. Potter and Wood, secretaries of Lord Chatham, then prime minister, and probably had some weight in determining the enterprise which resulted in Wolfe's brilliant victory. and the final retention of the Canadian provinces. About the year 1760, Franklin, assisted by his friend Richard Jackson, wrote a pamphlet entitled "The Interest of Great Britain considered with regard to the Colonies, and the Acquisition of Canada and Guadaloupe." In this work he demonstrated in a clear and forcible manner the advantages that would accrue to Great Britain from the proposed addition to her provincial territory.

His prediction that "there can never be manufactures to any amount or value in America" did not look to the possibility of a protective tariff. "Manufactures," he says, are founded in poverty: it is the multitude of poor without land in a country, and who must work for others at low

wages or starve, that enables undertakers to carry on a manufacture, and afford it cheap enough to prevent the importation of the same kind from abroad, and to bear the expense of its own exportation. But no man, who can have a piece of land of his own, sufficient by his labor to subsist his family in plenty, is poor enough to be a manufacturer, and work for a master. Hence, while there is land enough in America for our people, there can never be manufactures to any amount or value.” Could the writer have looked a century into the future, he would have been startled at the contradiction which time would give to these speculations.

The idea of the independence of the American Colonies. does not appear to have been seriously entertained by him at this time. He alludes to it as 66 a visionary danger." Of these Colonies, which American Independence and the American Constitution subsequently united in a harmonious system, he says: "Their jealousy of each other is so great, that, however necessary an union of the Colonies has long been for their common defence and security against their enemies, and how sensible soever each Colony has been of that necessity, yet they have never been able to effect such an union among themselves, nor even to agree in requesting the mother country to establish it for them." He repudiates the idea of a union of the Colonies against the mother country, but prudently adds a qualification in these words: "When I say such an union is impossible, I mean, without the most grievous tyranny and oppression."

The Proprietaries appear to have found in him a steady and vigilant antagonist. When the annual share of the Parliamentary grant due for military and other expenses to Pennsylvania and the Delaware Colonies, and amounting to about thirty thousand pounds, became payable, he was employed by the Assembly to receive and invest the amount. The Proprietaries interfered to prevent this disposition of the money, claiming that their deputy, the Governor, ought to have a hand in the management of the fund. Here they were again baffled by Franklin; for the ministry took his view of the matter, and decided that the money ought to be paid to the Assembly's agent.

Notwithstanding Franklin's opposition to the usurpations of the Proprietaries, the latter were forced to admit that his

course was fair and unexceptionable. "I do not find,". writes Thomas Penn, "that he has done me any prejudice with any party. I believe he has spent most of his time in philosophical, and especially in electrical, matters, having generally company in a morning to see those experiments, and musical performances on glasses, where any one that knows him carries his friends." The musical performances here referred to were on the Harmonica, an instrument contrived by Franklin, being an improvement on the mode of using musical glasses. It was quite in vogue at one time

in London.

"He was gifted," says Mignet, "with the spirit of observation and inference above all other endowments. Observation conducted him to discovery, and inference to a practical application of it. Was he traversing the ocean, he made experiments upon the temperature of the waters, and proved that the warmth of the water in the Gulf Stream was much greater than that of the water on each side of it. He thus revealed to mariners a simple mode of discovering when they were in the Gulf Stream. Was he listening to sounds produced by glasses put in vibration, he remarked that these sounds differed according to the size of the glass, and the relations to its width, capacity and contents. From these observations resulted the suggestion of a new musical instrument, and Franklin invented the Harmonica.* Did he chance to examine the loss of heat through the aperture of chimneys, and the imperfect combustion in a closed stove, he invented, from this double examination, by combining both means of heating, a chimney-place which was as economical as a stove, and a stove which was as open as a chimney-place. This stove, which is in the chimney-place form, was very generally adopted, and Franklin refused a

*Franklin possessed a strong natural taste for music. Leigh Hunt, speaking of his own mother, a Philadelphia lady, says: "Dr. Franklin offered to teach her the guitar, but she was too bashful to become his pupil. She regretted this afterward; partly, no doubt, for having missed so illustrious a master. Her first child, who died, was named after him. I know not whether the anecdote is new, but I have heard that, when Dr. Franklin invented the Harmonica, he concealed it from his wife till the instrument was fit to play, and then woke her with it one night, when she took it for the music of angels.' In one of his letters to his wife, Franklin presents his best respects to "dear, precious Mrs. Shewell," who was Leigh Hunt's grandmother.

patent for the exclusive sale. But his most glorious and important discovery was that of the nature of lightning and the laws of electricity."

The fact of the production of cold by evaporation, unfamiliar at the time to science, was illustrated by him on several occasions, while in England. Some curious experiments, by which an extraordinary degree of cold, even to freezing, might be produced by evaporation, had been previously communicated to him by Professor Simpson, of Glasgow. One of these was by wetting the ball of a thermometer with spirit of wine, thus causing the mercury to sink. Being at Cambridge, Franklin mentioned this to Dr. Hadley, professor of chemistry, and several interesting experiments were tried, of which an account is given by Franklin, in a letter to Dr. Lining. In another, to Dr. Heberden, he communicated some discoveries which he had made, to test a disputed question, in regard to the electrical peculiarities of the tourmaline, a stone found chiefly in the East Indies, and the chief constituents of which are silica and alumina. The transparent colored varieties are very beautiful. It was known to the ancients under the name of lyncurium. It was the opinion of pinus that the tourmaline is always endowed with a positive and negative electricity at the same moment, these different states being confined to opposite sides of the fossil. Franklin satisfied himself that this account was well-founded. He also observed that the warmth of his finger, when he wore the stone, was sufficient to give it some degree of electricity, so that it was always ready to attract light bodies. He thought that experiments might have failed, in many instances, in consequence of the stones having been improperly cut by the lapidaries, or through omission to impart to them the full heat given by boiling water.

In a letter to Alexander Small, of London, he communicates reasons, which he had long entertained, for the opinion that our north-east storms in North America begin first, in point of time, in the south-west parts: that is to say, the air in Georgia begins to move south-westerly before the air of Carolina, the air of Carolina before that of Virginia, and so on. Among his reasons for believing this, was the fact that, some twenty years before, having been prevented by a

north-east storm from witnessing an eclipse of the moon at Philadelphia, he subsequently learned that the eclipse was distinctly observed in Boston, and that the storm did not begin there till four hours after it had begun in Philadelphia. The conjecture deduced from this and similar facts has been abundantly confirmed by later experience; the telegraph now frequently reporting that a north-easterly storm is raging in Philadelphia, while the weather is yet clear in Boston. Franklin explained the phenomenon by supposing that, to produce our north-east storms, some great heat and rarefaction of the air must exist in or about the Gulf of Mexico; the air thence rising has its place supplied by the next more northern, cooler, and therefore denser and heavier air; that, being in motion, is followed by the next more northern air, &c., in a successive current, to which current our coast and inland ridge of mountains give the direction of north-east, as they lie north-east and south-west. In a letter from London to Peter Franklin, he speculates on the saltness of sea-water, and inclines to the opinion that all the water on this globe was originally salt, and that the fresh water we find in springs and rivers is the produce of distillation.

Several letters, written about this time to his landlady's intelligent daughter, Miss Stevenson, exhibit Franklin in a most amiable light. The mixture of playfulness with gravity, of the light-hearted pleasantry of the humorist with the profound insight of the sage, which they exhibit, is a combination as rare as it is charming. In one of these letters, in reply to the question from the young lady, why the water at Bristol, though cold at the spring, becomes warm by pumping, he says that it will be most prudent in him to forbear attempting to answer, till, by a more circumstantial account, he is assured of the fact; and he adds: "This prudence of not attempting to give reasons before one is sure of facts I learnt from one of your sex, who, as Selden tells us, being in company with some gentlemen that were viewing and considering something which they called a Chinese shoe, and disputing earnestly about the manner of wearing it, and how it could possibly be put on, put in her word, and said, modestly, 'Gentlemen, are you sure it is a shoe? Should not that be settled first ?'"