THE STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY 127 



tains. Later he stated that either the sea had once 

 stood at a higher level, or that these strata had been 

 raised by the force of earthquakes. Such convul- 

 sions of nature are not wholly injurious, since, by 

 bringing a great number of strata of different kinds 

 to day, they have rendered the earth more fit for 

 use, more capable of being to mankind a convenient 

 and comfortable habitation. He thought it unlikely 

 that a great bouleversement should happen if the 

 earth were solid to the center. Rather the surface of 

 the globe was a shell resting on a fluid of very great 

 specific gravity, and was thus capable of being broken 

 and disordered by violent movement. As late as 

 1788 Franklin wrote his queries and conjectures 

 relating to magnetism and the theory of the earth. 

 Did the earth become magnetic by the development 

 of iron ore ? Is not magnetism rather interplanetary 

 and interstellar ? May not the near passing of a 

 comet of greater magnetic force than the earth have 

 been a means of changing its poles and thereby 

 wrecking and deranging its surface, and raising and 

 depressing the sea level ? 



We are not here directly concerned with his polit- 

 ical career, in his checking of governors and propri- 

 etaries, in his activities as the greatest of American 

 diplomats, as the signer of the Declaration of In- 

 dependence, of the Treaty of Versailles, and of the 

 American Constitution, nor as the president of the 

 Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania in his 

 eightieth, eighty-first, and eighty-second years. When 

 he was eighty-four, as president of the Society for 

 Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, he signed a 

 petition to Congress against that atrocious debase- 



