Page:History of the University of Pennsylvania - Montgomery (1900).djvu/82

78 warm welcome in France and on the Continent. To enter here upon them with any description would open a most entertaining chapter in Franklin's life, but indulgence can only be given to a summary of their results as placing Franklin's name at the head of the practical discoverers of the sources and powers of this wonderful natural force, which we one hundred and thirty years later are just beginning to chain to our will and utilize in all our practical arts.

Dr. Priestly says of Franklin's records of his discoveries: it is not easy to say, whether we are most pleased with the simplicity and perspicuity with which these letters are written, the modesty with which the author proposes every hypothesis of his own, or the noble frankness with which he relates his mistakes, when they were corrected by subsequent experiments. Dr. Franklin's principles bid fair to be handed down to posterity as equally expressive of the true principles of electricity, as the Newtonian philosophy is of the true system of nature in general.

Before Priestley wrote this, Kinnersley had written to Franklin 12 March, 1761:

I most heartily congratulate you on the pleasure you must have in finding your great and well grounded expectations so far fulfilled. May this method of security [referring to the lightning rod] from the destructive violence of one of the most awful powers of nature meet with such further success, as to induce every good and grateful heart to bless God for the important discovery. May it extend to the latest posterity of mankind, and make the name of like that of  immortal.

To which Franklin refers in his letter from London 20 February, 1762, in conclusion "Your kind wishes and congratulations are very obliging."

This reference to the lightning rod is to Franklin's happy experiment with his kite in June 1752, in the open fields not far from his residence, by which he drew lightning from the clouds, establishing his theory that under some circumstances of peculiar attraction the electric fluid could be drawn to earth. His theories had been known abroad, and the "Philadelphia