ilosophy
to the royal family, and an able experimenter, who had form'd and
publish'd a theory of electricity, which then had the general vogue.
He could not at first believe that such a work came from America, and
said it must have been fabricated by his enemies at Paris, to decry
his system. Afterwards, having been assur'd that there really existed
such a person as Franklin at Philadelphia, which he had doubted, he
wrote and published a volume of Letters, chiefly address'd to me,
defending his theory, and denying the verity of my experiments, and of
the positions deduc'd from them.

[108] A celebrated French naturalist (1707-1788).

[109] Dalibard, who had translated Franklin's letters to
Collinson into French, was the first to demonstrate, in
a practical application of Franklin's experiment, that
lightning and electricity are the same. "This was May
10th, 1752, one month before Franklin flew his famous
kite at Philadelphia and proved the fact
himself."--McMaster.

I once purpos'd answering the abbe, and actually began the answer;
but, on consideration that my writings contained a description of
experiments which anyone might repeat and verify, and if not to be
verifi'd, could not be defended; or of observations offer'd as
conjectures, and not delivered dogmatically, therefore not laying me
under any obligation to defend them; and reflecting that a dispute
between two persons, writing in different languages, might be
lengthened greatly by mistranslations, and thence misconceptions of
one another's meaning, much of one of the abbe's letters being founded
on an error in the translation, I concluded to let my papers shift for
themselves, believing it was better to spend what time I could spare
from public business in making new experiments, than in disputing
about those already made. I therefore never answered M. Nollet, and
the event gave me no cause to repent my silence; for my friend M. le
Roy, of the Royal Academy of Sciences, took up my cause and refuted
him; my book was translated into the Italian, German, and Latin
languages; and the doctrine it contain'd was by degrees universally
adopted by the philosophers of Europe, in preference to that of the
abbe; so that he lived to see himself the last of his sect, except
Monsieur B----, of Paris, his _eleve_ and immediate disciple.

What gave my book the more sudden and general celebrity, was the
success of one of its proposed experim