i9o6] ABBE— BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AS METEOROLOGIST. 121 



back again to blue on the 7th ; and on the nth they anchored at Red 

 Bank, six miles from Philadelphia. 



Having become proprietor of the Pennsylvania Gazette in Oc- 

 tober, 1729, he published therein an article on earthquakes (com- 

 piled, of course, from many sources, to which he gives full credit), 

 as he says, " because of the interest excited in the subject by our 

 recent earthquakes," alluding to slight local earthquakes of 1725 

 and 1726, that were felt throughout the allied colonies and roused 

 many queries and fears. His editorial work stimulated his habits 

 of reading and writing. He made notes of everything that could 

 be useful to his readers. . . . 



In 1726, August 2 1 St, occurred the destruction of Peruna, Italy. 

 In 1740 occurred the great earthquake at Lima. In 1750, that at 

 Concepcion in Chili. On November i, 1755, a part of Lisbon was 

 swallowed up by an earthquake, sixty thousand persons perished in 

 a few minutes and the ocean flowed over the site of the disaster. 

 In 1755, October 30th, Damascus was destroyed and twelve thousand 

 lives were lost. In 1760, November 25th, Tripoli was destroyed. 

 These were the great earthquakes to which attention w^as forcibly 

 directed during his early manhood, and such events must be asso- 

 ciated with his own intellectual activity. 



From 1732 to 1757 there were 25 annual issues of liis " Richard 

 Saunders Almanack." Now while it is true that in these he pub- 

 lished conjectures as to the weather during the respective years, 

 yet we are not to think of Franklin as a planetary meteorologist; 

 for the fact is that in every one of these issues he disclaims all 

 knowledge of the weather or astrology and pokes fun at his own 

 predictions as utterly absurd and useless. He gives them, as he says, 

 for what they are worth as food for reflection, as matters that are 

 an essential part of a farmer'-s almanac, — not based upon any 

 knowledge of nature but simply fanciful conjectures. They served, 

 of course, to make his almanac sell, but they were not put forth in 

 any serious vein of thought, but were really to him a matter of 

 humor and fun. For instance, in his preface to his almanac for 1738 

 he makes '' Mystriss Saunders " apologize for the imperfections of 

 the almanac owing to the sudden departure of the husband, "poor 

 Dick " ; she adds, '' upon looking over the months I see he has put in 



