174 KEPOKT OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE 



These letters admit of no doubt as to the identity of the 

 Societies referred to and clearly indicate the habit of 

 the day of referring to the revived society as a new 

 society. It was this habit which led Charles Thomson 

 to write of the revived Junto as the Society " begun in 

 the year 1750," and so puzzled the older Committee 

 that they were fain to invent the hypothesis of the two 

 Juntos. "You remember the Society to which I be- 

 longed, which was begun in the year 1750," so Mr. 

 Thomson writes to Franklin November 6, 1768. t i From 

 some conversation I had with you, 1 some few of us 

 exerted ourselves to revive it again." 



A careful reading of this letter suggests that the or- 

 ganization of 1750, to which Thomson refers, was a 

 revival of the Junto whose name it bore and whose 

 laws and rules it adopted. He would hardly have writ- 

 ten to Franklin "You remember the Society to which 

 I belonged," were it not the Junto of which Franklin 

 had been the founder, and in which he continued his 

 interest, even though he had passed from its member- 

 ship. In 1750 Thomson was but twenty-one years of 

 age, and had just been brought to Philadelphia to teach 

 Greek and Latin in the new Academy. Franklin was 

 more than double his age, and therefore not likely to 

 have been on terms of such intimate friendship with 

 him as to have known with what societies he had allied 



i This conversation occurred probably before the end of 1764, when 

 Franklin returned to Europe, and when the Society was in a state of 

 somnolence from October, 1762j to April, 1766, as is shown by the ab- 

 sence of minutes. 



