Dr. Franklin was annually elected president of the society, Dr. Thomas Cadwalader officiating during his residence abroad. Brissot de Warville, coming to Philadelphia in 1788, exclaims, with devoutness rare in a Frenchman, “Thanks be to God, he still exists! This great man, for so many years the preceptor of the Americans, who so gloriously contributed to their independence; death had threatened his days, but our fears are dissipated, and his health is restored.” Two years later the same chronicler records, “Franklin has enjoyed this year the blessing of death, for which he waited so long a time.”
As president of the Philosophical Society, he was succeeded, in 1791, by Dr. Rittenhouse, the greatest American astronomer, of whom Jefferson said, “We have supposed Rittenhouse second to no astronomer living; in genius he must be first, because he is self-taught.” It was he who contributed to the society the first purely scientific paper in its series of Transactions, a calculation on the transit of Venus. He also described a wonderful orrery, which represented the revolution of the heavenly bodies more completely than it had ever been done before, and which he had himself constructed at the age of twenty-three. In June, 1769, he made observations on the transit of Venus. “The whole horizon was without a cloud,” says Rittenhouse, in his report of this event; and so greatly excited was the young astronomer that, in the instant of one of the contacts of the planet with the sun, he actually fainted with emotion. Rittenhouse’s interesting report on this phenomenon, which had never been seen but twice before by any inhabitant of the earth, was received with satisfaction by learned and scientific men everywhere. Those who visit the hall of the society to-day may look out upon the State-House yard from the same window through which Rittenhouse made his observations, and note the passing hours upon the face of a clock constructed by his hands, which, the curator says, “still keeps good time.”
Prominent among the portraits of early officers is an interesting picture of Thomas Jefferson, who was third president of the Philosophical Society, as well as of the United States. This painting, which well portrays the intellectual and spirited face of the original, was executed at Monticello by Mr. Sully, who was invited there for this purpose. Jefferson, who would have been a great scientist had he not been called upon by his country to use his powers as a statesman, naturally took a warm interest in the Philosophical Society, and was a member long before he was made its president in 1797. While abroad he disputed the arguments of the learned Count de Buffon on the degeneracy of American animals, and finally made his position secure by sending the astonished Frenchman the bones, skin, and horns of an enormous New Hampshire moose. Equally convincing was this, and more agreeable than the manner in which Dr. Franklin answered a similar argument on the degeneracy of American men, by making all the Americans at table, and all the Frenchmen, stand up. As those of his compatriots present happened to be fine specimens physically, towering above the little Gauls, the good doctor had the argument all his own way.
It seemed, indeed, as if these two great men, who so harmoniously combined the ideal and the practical, were born to prove to the world that genius of the highest order, in science, letters, and statecraft, is not incompatible with the same sort of ability that is essential to the success of a Western farmer or a skilled mechanic. Hence, if Dr. Franklin employed his leisure hours in inventing an improved stove, or explaining to the Philosophical Society why certain chimneys smoked; Mr. Jefferson used his in designing a plough, for which he received a gold medal from France, and in calculating the number of bushels of wheat to the acre, at Monticello. One day, he is interesting himself in the importation of seed-rice from Italy, from the Levant, and from Egypt; while on another, he is helping the Philosophical Society to frame instructions for the guidance of André Michaux in his Western explorations. It was life that interested them both,—life in the smaller details that affect home comfort, as well as in the broader issues that bear upon the happiness of states and nations. In Mr. Jefferson’s minute directions regarding the education of his daughters, and in his grasp of the details of farming, we recognize the same sort of practical common sense that so eminently distinguished Dr. Franklin, of whom his latest biographer says, in his own forcible and epigrammatic style,—“Whatever he has said on domestic economy, or thrift, is sound and striking. No other writer has left so many just and original observations on success in life. No other writer has pointed out so clearly the way to obtain the greatest amount of comfort out of life. What Solomon did for the spiritual man, that did Franklin for the earthly man. The book of Proverbs is a collection of receipts for laying up treasure in heaven. ‘Poor Richard’ is a collection of receipts for laying up treasure on earth.”[24]
In addition to its regular meetings for business and for scientific purposes, the Philosophical Society had its gala days, its annual dinners, and its especial receptions and entertainments given to distinguished strangers. Hither, in 1794, came the Rev. Joseph Priestley, of Birmingham, counted in France too devout for a scientist, and in England too broad for the clergy. As the discoverer of oxygen, the friend of Franklin, whose experiments in electricity he had described, and a devotee to the cause of liberty, Dr. Priestley was warmly welcomed by the Philosophical Society, which not only received him into its own learned brotherhood, but adopted him into American citizenship. This first reception was followed by a dinner given by the learned coterie in honor of Dr. Priestley.
Many anecdotes of these old dinners have been handed down, showing that when the good philosophers put science aside they could be as lively raconteurs and bons vivants as the world has ever seen. On such festive occasions, the witty old Abbé Correa de Serra, Judge Peters, Mr. Du Ponceau, Dr. Caspar Wistar, Mr. John Vaughan, and later, Robert Walsh, LL.D., and the Honorable William Short of Virginia, both most delightful talkers, George Ord, William Strickland the architect, and the ever-ready wits Dr. Nathaniel Chapman and Nicholas Biddle, gathered around the board.
Of Judge Peters’s clever sayings we find numerous records. As he grew older, his sharp nose and chin approached each other closely. A friend observed to him, one day, that his nose and chin would soon be at loggerheads. “Very likely,” he replied, “for hard words often pass between them.” Once, while he was Speaker of the House of Assembly, one of the members, in crossing the room, tripped on the carpet and fell flat. The House burst into laughter, while the judge, with the utmost gravity, cried, “Order, order, gentlemen! Do you not see that a member is on the floor?” Unceremonious, communicative, friendly, Judge Peters was the life of every circle that he entered; correcting Mayor Wharton at a dinner when he called to the waiter, “John, more wine,” saying that it was a demijohn that he needed, while he himself “drank like a fish,” as he expressed it, from his goblet of water, requiring no artificial aid to brighten wits that were always keen and scintillating.
Mr. George Ord, who was a delightful raconteur as well as a learned naturalist, took great pleasure in relating a story of his friend Dr. Abercrombie, a fellow-member of the society. Dr. James Abercrombie, sometime rector of Christ and St. Peter’s Churches, was a divine of the old school, who despised not the good things of this lower world while engaged in preparation for those of the higher. Once, while on a pastoral visit to the small town of Shrewsbury, New Jersey, where an Episcopal church had been established, Dr. Abercrombie was regaled with some very fine old Madeira wine, which he drank with evident appreciation, and probably some surprise at finding anything so choice in that region of the country. The next day, according to Mr. Ord’s story, the good parson chose for his text that most appropriate verse from the Acts of the Apostles, in which St. Paul says, “And the barbarous people showed us no little kindness.”
Another clerical member of the learned fraternity was William White, one of our early American bishops, who was an ardent patriot and a genial companion, as well as the most devout of churchmen. A warm friend of Benjamin West, the artist, Bishop White was fond of telling how he helped West to secure his bride, Miss Betty Shewell. Mr. West was in England, and so busy painting for the court and royal family that he could not come over to America to marry his fiancée; but, as his father was about to sail for England, he wrote to Miss Shewell, begging her to join his father, and make the voyage with him. Miss Shewell’s brother, who was averse to the match, chiefly because West was an impecunious genius, put a stop to the proceedings by confining the fair bride-elect in an upper room. Bishop White, then a very young man, Dr. Franklin, and Mr. Francis Hopkinson determined to help on the “course of true love” by facilitating Miss Shewell’s escape to the ship, which was waiting for her at Chester. This they did by means of a romantic rope-ladder and a carriage around the corner. Miss Shewell with her maid reached the ship in good time, and a few weeks after was married to Benjamin West in the English chapel of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. In telling this story, the kindly bishop was wont to add, gleefully, “Ben was a good fellow, and deserved a good wife, and I would do the same thing over again to-day,”—a sentiment, we may be sure, that was greeted with applause by the gravest of the philosophers, they being no exception to the rule that “all the world loves a lover.” An active member of the society, and for years one of its counsellors, Bishop White was present on all important occasions, grave or gay. Having known General Washington and the other great men of the Revolution, and met and conversed with Samuel Johnson while in England, his was one of the few familiar faces that greeted the Marquis de Lafayette when he revisited America in 1824.
Another face to be seen for many successive years at the meetings of the society, and at its annual dinners, was that of Peter S. Du Ponceau, the French lawyer and philologist, who lived here for so many years. He has left behind him pictures of some of his learned associates that prove to us that these gentlemen, whose faces look down upon us gravely from century-old portraits, were, on occasions, as full of quips and quirks and fun and frolic as the most jovial collegian of our day. Of his frequent journeys to Washington to attend the sessions of the Supreme Court of the United States, in company with Mr. Ingersoll, Mr. William Rawle, Mr. Lewis, and Mr. Edward Tilghman, he says,—