cal were queerly blended. The essential unorderliness of the
American mind is admirably illustrated by that "Father of all the
Yankees," Benjamin Franklin. No student of Franklin's life fails to be
impressed by its happy casualness, its cheerful flavor of the
rogue-romance. Gil Blas himself never drifted into and out of an
adventure with a more offhand and imperturbable adroitness. Franklin
went through life with the joyous inventiveness of the amateur. He had
the amateur's enthusiasm, coupled with a clairvoyant penetration into
technical problems such as few amateurs have possessed. With all of his
wonderful patience towards other men, Franklin had in the realm of
scientific experiment something of the typical impatience of the mere
dabbler. He was inclined to lose interest in the special problem before
it was worked out. His large, tolerant intelligence was often as
unorderly as his papers and accounts. He was a wonderful colonial
Jack-of-all-trades; with a range of suggestion, a resourcefulness, a
knack of assimilation, a cosmopolitan many-sidedness, which has left us
perpetually his debtors. Under different surroundings, and disciplined
by a more severe and orderly training, Franklin might easily have
developed the very highest order of professional scientific
achievement. His natural talent for organization of men and
institutions, his "early projecting public spirit," his sense of the
lack of formal educational advantages in the colonies, made him the
founder of the Philadelphia Academy, the successful agitator for public
libraries. Academicism, even in the narrow sense, owes much to this
LL.D. of St. Andrews, D.C.L. of Oxford, and intimate associate of
French academicians. But one smiles a little, after all, to see the
bland printer in this academic company: he deserves his place there,
indeed, but he is something more and other than his associates. He is
the type of youthful, inexhaustible colonial America; reckless of
precedent, self-taught, splendidly alive; worth, to his day and
generation, a dozen born academicians; and yet suggesting by his very
imperfections, that the Americans of a later day, working under
different conditions, are bound to develop a sort of professional
skill, of steady, concentrated, ordered intellectual activity, for
which Franklin possessed the potential capacity rather than the
opportunity and the desire.

Yet there were latent lines of order, hints and prophecies of a coming
fellow