



28 LIFE AXD CORRESPONDENCE OF THE [l79I 



stated employment with a money compensation would give to him, 

 that the General Assembly of Pennsylvania having, on the 13th 

 day of April, 1791, passed an act relating to the opening and im- 

 proving of certain roads, rivers, and navigable waters in Pennsyl- 

 vania, and there being requisite to the accomplishment of the work 

 a Commission of Inquiry, that Governor Mifflin, on the loth of 

 the following May, appointed Dr. Smith, David Rittenhouse and 

 William Findley joint "agents of information" relating to the 

 work. It seems strange that a clergyman, the late head of two 

 colleges, the president of all the ecclesiastical councils of his 

 church, should be put upon such a Commission, and especially that 

 he should be made chairman of it. But to no one could the office 

 have been more properly entrusted. As owner of large quantities 

 of land in Huntingdon county — long the Ultima Tlmlc of our 

 civilization — and by his natural tastes as well, few men of the day 

 were better acquainted with the geography, hydrography and 

 geology of Pennsylvania. His great physical strength, which had 

 not yet failed him, his large acquaintance with the leading men in 

 every part of the Commonwealth, his winning manners — when he 

 had no cause to make them the reverse of winning — and his fine 

 powers of business of every kind, rendered him eminently fit to be 

 the head even of a Commission which would have been so little 

 congenial to the disposition or capacities of most of the clergy. 



In the course of his official duty Dr. Smith had many opportu- 

 nities of seeing lands in different parts of the State which he was 

 certain would rise in value. Some of these, at a later date, he ac- 

 quired, and this without the least breach of official trust, for the 

 acquisition of bodies of land for the State or for any body in it, 

 was no part whatever of the purposes of his appointment. 



We have already mentioned that on the death of Dr. Franklin, 

 who was President of the American Philosophical Society — an 

 institution of which Dr. Smith was a founder at its institution in 

 1769, and the secretary of which he had been from that date — the 

 Society requested Dr. Smith to pronounce a commemorative dis- 

 course upon their honored chief officer. If any man could have 

 had a right to refuse the office. Dr. Smith could have done so. 

 For, united with Thomas Willing, William Allen, the Tilghmans 

 and others of the very best men in Pennsylvania, he had been for 

 many years in political opposition to Dr. Franklin, and Dr. Frank- 



