PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



Franklin was unanimously elected a member of that learned 

 body without application from him; and in recognition, as it 

 were, of the honour conferred upon the society rather than 

 upon him by the connection, he was excused from making the 

 customary payment. 



Franklin's literary work was a part and a product of his un- 

 ceasing activity. Always doing or observing, he was always 

 thinking and learning; and what he thought and learned he 

 was ready to communicate at once to some one of his numer- 

 ous correspondents who would be interested by it or might 

 derive advantage from it. When his observations had borne 

 fruit in some discovery or practicable scheme, he embodied the 

 result in some essay or paper, which likewise, most usually, 

 took the form of a letter to a friend. The spirit of the hour, as 

 Mr. G. Brown Goode well said at the American Philosophical 

 Society's commemoration of the centennial of Franklin's death, 

 was his constant inspiration, " and his writings were a legiti- 

 mate result, the natural outgrowth of his activity in all matters 

 of public concern. Admirable in themselves, their chief inter- 

 est is nevertheless due to the fact that they form so complete 

 a record of the deeds and the personal character of their 

 author. Though he was a voluminous writer, and one of the 

 great masters of English expression, Franklin wrote habitually 

 with a single eye to immediate practical results. He never 

 posed for posterity." 



One of the most salient features of his scientific writings is 

 the broadness of his interests in that field. Nothing that could 

 conduce to the advancement of knowledge or to the promo- 

 tion of the well-being of men for which knowledge was to be 

 valued escaped his attention. He was most deeply interested 

 in matters that concerned health and comfort; domestic econ- 

 omy, the art of getting along, of making life easier and more 

 profitable, of saving and of improving what one had, followed ; 

 related to this was interest in the introduction to his country- 

 men of new products and additional sources of revenue, con- 

 cerning which there are many letters; and from these he went 

 into all the fields of pure science in which the thought of the 

 day busied itself. If the subject were not one on which he had 

 himself experimented or a scheme on which he had some 

 definite plan, he could discuss the observations of others and 

 present speculations which were always sagacious respecting 



