e excellence
of the glass.

The first thing that strikes us, in looking over Doctor Franklin's
works, is the variety of his observations upon different subjects. We
might imagine, that a very tenacious and powerful memory was
necessary to register all these; but Dr. Franklin informs us, that it
was his constant practice to note down every hint as it occurred to
him: he urges his friends to do the same; he observes, that there is
scarcely a day passes without our hearing or seeing something which,
if properly attended to, might lead to useful discoveries. By thus
committing his ideas to writing, his mind was left at liberty _to
think_. No extraordinary effort of memory was, even upon the greatest
occasions, requisite. A friend wrote to him to inquire how he was led
to his great discovery of the identity of lightning and electricity;
and how he first came to think of drawing down lightning from the
clouds. Dr. Franklin replies, that he could not answer better than by
giving an extract from the minutes he used to keep of the experiments
he made, with memorandums of such as he purposed to make, the reasons
for making them, and the observations that rose upon them. By this
extract, says Dr. Franklin, you will see that the thought was not so
much _an out of the way one_, but that it might have occurred to any
electrician.[50]

When the ideas are arranged in clear order, as we see them in this
note, the analogy or induction to which Dr. Franklin was led, appears
easy. Why, then, had it never been made by any other person? Numbers
of ingenious men were at this time intent upon electricity. The ideas
which were necessary to this discovery, were not numerous or
complicated. We may remark, that one analogy connecting these
observations together, they are more easily recollected; and their
being written down for a particular purpose, on which Dr. Franklin's
mind was intent, must have made it still easier to him to retain them.

The degree of memory he was forced to employ, is thus reduced to a
portion in which few people are defective. Now, let us suppose, that
Dr. Franklin, at the time he wrote his memorandum, had fully in his
recollection every previous experiment that had ever been tried on
electricity; and not only these, but the theories, names, ages, and
private history, of all the men who had tried these experiments; of
what advantage would this have been to him? He must have excluded all
these impertinent ideas successi