552 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



are left in the air, so to speak, and something must be 

 done without delay to replace the shattered underpinning, 

 a task often requiring much ingenuity and some subtlety. 

 Watson had already suffered the first annoyance at the 

 hands of Lemonnier. When Collinson gave him Frank- 

 lin's letters, he found that the second was also to be en- 

 countered. He could not dispute Franklin's conclusions, 

 because he was himself convinced that they explained 

 matters very much more reasonably than did his own. 

 He felt instinctively that if he had only thought of them 

 he would have promulgated them without hesitation. 

 Unfortunately he had not done so. In brief, he was will- 

 ing to admit the validity of Franklin's theory, but unwill- 

 ing to concede the invalidity of his own. 



The communication which Watson sent to the Royal 

 Society in January, 1748, would have been more in har- 

 mony with the reputation of its brilliant and ingenious 

 author had he shown in it greater candor. As it was, his 

 chosen course precipitated a controversy which has re- 

 tained vitality to the present time, and which has engen- 

 dered dissensions exhibiting British insularity in some of 

 its least agreeable phases. Without seeking to revive it 

 here, it will suffice to say that Watson found, in his own 

 mind, arguments which justified him in affirming that his 

 theory, as a whole and radically, had always been the same 

 as that propounded by Franklin, although a suspicion of 

 salving his conscience is unavoidable when it is found that 

 afterwards he really reverses his hypothesis in detail to 

 make it accord. His partisans saw in the first proceeding 

 reason for ascribing to him, rather than to Franklin, the 

 full credit for originating the plus and minus doctrine; and 

 in the second, only proof of ingenuous willingness on the 

 part of the most eminent philosopher in the kingdom to 

 defer to any one, however humble, rather than permit 

 conclusions presented by him to retain the semblance 

 of inaccuracy. But even an advocacy which included that 

 of the all-knowing Whewell, and left its mark in the 



