64 Eliot: Franklin 



quaintances pursued the subject for four years, with no 

 thought about personal credit for inventing either the- 

 ories or processes, but simply with delight in experimen- 

 tation and in efforts to explain the phenomena he ob- 

 served. His kite experiment to prove lightning to be 

 an electrical phenomenon very possibly did not really 

 draw lightning from the cloud; but it supplied evidence 

 of electrical energy in the atmosphere which went far 

 to prove that lightning was an electrical discharge. The 

 sagacity of Franklin's scientific inquiries is well illus- 

 tracted by his notes on colds and their causes. He main- 

 tains that the influenzas usually classed as colds do not 

 arise as a rule from either cold or dampness. He points 

 out that savages and sailors, who are often wet, do not 

 catch cold, and that the disease called a cold is not taken 

 by swimming. He maintains that people who live in 

 the forest, in open barns, or with open windows, do not 

 catch cold, and that the disease called a cold is generally 

 caused by impure air, lack of exercise, or over-eating. 

 He comes to the conclusion that influenzas and colds are 

 contagious — a doctrine which, a century and a half later, 

 was proved, through the advance of bacteriological sci- 

 ence, to be sound. The following sentence exhibits re- 

 markable insight, considering the state of medical art at 

 that time: " I have long been satisfied from observation, 

 that besides the general colds now termed influenzas 

 (which may possibly spread by contagion, as well as by 



