“Mr. Nicholls tells me of several other Gentlemen of this City [New York] that incline to encourage the Thing.—There are a Number of others in Virginia, Maryland, Carolina, and the New England States who we expect to join us assoon [sic] as they are acquainted that the Society has begun to form itself. I am, Sir, with much respect,
“Your most humᵉ sevᵗ
“B. Franklin.”[22]
The Honorable Cadwallader Colden was one of the original members of the American Philosophical Society, and took an active interest in its establishment and advance. He and Dr. Franklin were intimate friends, and in the habit of communicating to each other their scientific discoveries. It was Dr. Colden who introduced into the study of botany in America the system of Linnæus.
One of the founders and the first president of this society was Mr. Thomas Hopkinson, whom Dr. Franklin called his “ingenious friend,” and to whom he acknowledges his indebtedness for demonstrating “the power of points to throw off the electrical fire.” Another “ingenious friend,” to whom he makes no profound acknowledgment, was the Rev. Ebenezer Kinnersley, a professor in the College of Philadelphia, to whom it is now generally conceded that Franklin owed much of his success in important electrical discoveries. Mr. Parton says that, in 1748, “Mr. Kinnersley contrived the amusing experiment of the magical picture. A figure of his majesty King George II. (‘God preserve him,’ says the loyal Franklin, in parenthesis, when telling the story) was so arranged that any one who attempted to take his crown from his head received a tremendous shock.” By this clever contrivance Mr. Kinnersley proves himself something of a prophet as well as a scientist, for notwithstanding the violent shock received by the friends of royalty in the colonies, a few years later, it was conclusively demonstrated that the crown could be taken off.
In drawing up rules for the government of the Philosophical Society, Dr. Franklin advises that correspondence be maintained not only between the central organization and its members in the different colonies, but with the Royal Society of London and the Dublin Society. Thus persons residing in remote districts of the United States would be placed in direct communication with the latest discoveries of Old World scientists in all their lines of work. What such correspondence meant to men of intelligence, living far from the centres of education and enlightenment, in those days of few books and fewer magazines and journals, it is impossible for us to imagine. Many years later, when the French botanist, André Michaux, was appointed by his government to examine the trees of this continent, with a view to their introduction into France, he carried letters from the Philosophical Society to one of its members, living in Lexington, Kentucky.
“During my stay at Lexington,” Michaux writes, “I frequently saw Dr. Samuel Brown, from Virginia, a physician of the College of Edinburgh, and a member of the Philosophical Society.... Receiving regularly the scientific journals from London, he is always in the channel of new discoveries, and turns them to the advantage of his fellow-citizens. It is to him that they are indebted for the introduction of the cow-pox. He had at that time inoculated upwards of five hundred persons in Kentucky, when they were making their first attempts in New York and Philadelphia.”
Agreeable as it must have been to Michaux to find flowers of science blooming in these western wilds, we can imagine the even greater delight that such a man as Dr. Brown must have experienced in meeting and conversing with this foreigner, fresh from Old World haunts of learning, with his interesting budget of news, political as well as scientific. Those were the exciting days of the Consulate in France, when Lord Nelson was gaining victories for England in the Northern seas; and we can picture to ourselves these two learned gentlemen, seated before a great fire of logs, with a steaming bowl of punch, made from the famous Kentucky apple-jack beside them, turning away from the paths of science to discuss Napoleon’s victories, the coalition against England, and the assassination of the Emperor Paul in Russia, which was followed by a treaty between his successor and the English sovereign.
American science must have been in a condition of encouraging activity between 1750 and 1767, for in those years there were no less than three societies in Philadelphia whose aims and pursuits were in the main identical,—the promotion of useful knowledge and the drawing together of its votaries. These societies were a second Junto, of which the indefatigable Dr. Franklin was a member, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Society. This division in the ranks of science probably arose from the feeling existing between the adherents of the Penn family and those averse to them; these parties being as violently opposed to each other as were, later, Federalist and Democratic-Republican; or, still later, the Whig and Democratic parties. Happily for the historian, who is sadly confused by Juntos and Juntolings, and by American Societies which were philosophical, and Philosophical Societies which were also American, these different bodies showed a disposition to unite, and in 1769 were incorporated into one society, under the title of American Philosophical Society, held at Philadelphia, for Promoting Useful Knowledge. This title proving a trifle “unhandy for every-day use,” to borrow the phraseology of a patriotic farmer’s wife, who bestowed upon one of her offspring the entire heading of the Republican ticket in 1860, “Abraham Lincoln Hannibal Hamlin,” it has gradually been abbreviated into the American Philosophical Society, there being now no other.
Of this united society Dr. Franklin was elected president, the first of an honorable line of presidents, whose portraits adorn the walls of the old rooms on Fifth Street, where the philosophers met more than a hundred years ago. The society obtained a grant of land from the State of Pennsylvania in 1785, and in 1787 its hall was completed, the one still used, in whose sunshiny rooms are now gathered the relics, the treasures, and the memories of a century. Here is the old chair on whose broad arm Jefferson wrote the Declaration, and here are autograph letters and autographs of such value as to fill the soul of the collector with “envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness.” On one side of the hall is the well-known and most characteristic portrait of Dr. Franklin,[23] in his blue coat, large wig, and spectacles, while near by is his marble effigy by Houdon, whose statue of Washington bears the proud inscription, “Fait par Houdon, citoyen Français.”