206 Life of Count Rumford. 



himself in Germany had been so engrossing that his 

 whole mind and thought must have been concentrated 

 upon them. It would hardly surprise us, therefore, if 

 we were left to infer that he had been comparatively 

 uninformed about many important events transpiring in 

 his native country at the most critical periods of its 

 constitutional development. But he seems not to have 

 been in ignorance of its public affairs nor of its dis- 

 tinguished men in politics or science. On the other 

 hand, though reports of the eminence to which he had 

 attained and of the philosophical genius to which he 

 had given exercise were, of course, current in America, 

 it was not till the publication of his Essays that his 

 real achievements were known. 



When Benjamin Thompson sailed from this country, 

 he left behind him, as we have seen, his wife and infant 

 daughter. The latter having been born October 1 8, 

 1774, was thus by absence deprived of a father's care 

 at about the same age as that in which he himself had 

 been bereft by the death of his own father. It has been 

 affirmed in more than one sketch of Count Rumford's 

 life, that his family heard and knew nothing of him till 

 the close of the Revolutionary War. Even if there be no 

 positive evidence in refutation of this statement, and in 

 the want or loss of writings covering that period of time 

 I am not able to produce such evidence, the assertion 

 would in itself seem a preposterous one. The public 

 services upon which Mr. Thompson entered at once on 

 his arrival in England ; the constant intercourse which 

 he had with a great many refugees from Boston and 

 Salem and other places, with several of whom he must 

 have had a previous acquaintance at home; and his 

 own official duties which required him to be a party to a 



