12 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 



" After it was dark we went into the house, and he invited me to 

 his library, which is likewise his study. It is a very large cham 

 ber and high-studded. The walls are covered with shelves filled 

 with books ; beside these, four large alcoves, extending two-thirds 

 the length of the chamber, filled in the same manner. I presume 

 this is the largest and by far the best private library in America. 

 He showed me a glass machine for exhibiting the circulation of 

 the blood in the arteries and veins of the human body. The cir 

 culation is exhibited by the passing of a red fluid from a reservoir 

 into numerous capillary tubes of glass, ramified in every direction, 

 and then returning in similar tubes to the reservoir, which was 

 done with great velocity, and without any power acting visibly 

 upon the fluid, and had the appearance of perpetual motion. 

 Another great curiosity was a rolling press for taking copies of 

 letters or other writing. A sheet of paper is completely copied 

 in two minutes, the copy as fair as the original, and without de 

 facing it in the smallest degree. It is an invention of his own, 

 extremely useful in many circumstances of life. He also showed 

 us his long artificial hand and arm for taking down and putting 

 up books on high shelves, out of reach, and his great arm-chair, 

 with rockers and a large fan placed over it, with which he fans 

 himself, while he sits reading, with only a slight motion of the 

 foot, and many other curiosities and inventions, all his own, but 

 of lesser note. Over his mantel he has a prodigious number of 

 medals, busts, and casts in wax or plaster of Paris, which are the 

 effigies of the most noted characters of Europe. But what the 

 Doctor wished especially to show me was a huge volume on bot 

 any, which indeed afforded me the greatest pleasure of any one 

 thing in his library. It was a single volume, but so large that it 

 was with great difficulty that he was able to raise it from a low 

 shelf and lift it to the table ; but, with that senile ambition which 

 is common to old people (Dr. Franklin was eighty-one), he in 

 sisted on doing it himself, and would permit no one to assist him, 

 merely to show how much strength he had remaining. It con 

 tained the whole of Linnaeus's Systema Vegetabilium, with large 

 cuts colored from nature of every plant. It was a feast to me, 

 and the Doctor seemed to enjoy it as well as myself. We spent 

 a couple of hours examining this volume, while the other gentle 

 men amused themselves with other matters/ The Doctor is not 

 a botanist, but lamented he did not in early life attend to this 

 science. He delights in natural history, and expressed an earnest 

 wish that I should pursue a plan I had begun, and hoped this 

 science, so much neglected in America, would be pursued with 

 as much ardor here as it is now in every part of Europe. I 

 wanted, for three months at least, to have devoted myself entirely 

 to this one volume, but, fearing lest I should become tedious to 

 him, I shut the book, though he urged me to examine it longer. 



