From Benjamin Franklin to Cadwalader Evans, 27 August 1770
To Cadwalader Evans
Reprinted from Samuel Hazard, ed., Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania, XVI, No. 5 (Aug. 1, 1835), 92.
London, Aug. 27, 1770.
Dear Doctor
I am favoured with yours of June 10. With this I send you our last Volume of Philosophical Transactions, wherein you will see printed the Observations of Messrs. Biddle and Bayley on the Transit, as well as those of Messrs. Mason and Dixon relating to the Longitude of Places.5 When you and your Friends have perus’d it, please to deliver it to Mrs. Franklin to be put among my Books.
Thanks for the Books on the Silk Affair.6 It will give me great pleasure to see that Business brought to Perfection among us. The Subscription is a noble One, and does great Honour to our Public Spirit.7 If you should not procure from Georgia, as you expected, one that understands the Reeling, I believe I can procure you such a Hand from Italy, a great Silk Merchant here having offered me his Assistance for that purpose if wanted.8
I am happy beyond Expression to see the Virtue and Firmness of our Country with regard to the Non-importation. It does us great Honour. And New York is in great Disgrace with all the Friends of Liberty in the Kingdom,9 who are, I assure you, no contemptible Number, who applaud the stand we have made, wish us Success. I am, my dear friend, Yours most affectionately,
B. Franklin.
Dr. Cad. Evans.
5. “Observations of the Transit of Venus over the Sun, June 3, 1769; made by Mr. Owen Biddle and Mr. Joel Bayley,” Phil. Trans., LIX (1769), 414–21; the article includes some remarks by Nevil Maskelyne about the observations of Mason and Dixon published in the previous volume of Phil. Trans.
6. Odell’s translation of a French work that BF had sent to Evans; see above, XVI, 200.
7. The prospectus for an organization of subscribers to encourage the culture of silk in Pennsylvania was published in Pa. Gaz., March 8, 1770, and the same paper carried an article on the subject a week later.
8. The merchant was probably BF’s partner in land speculation, the Hon. Thomas Walpole. See BF to Evans below, Feb. 10, 1771.
9. For the action of the Philadelphia merchants and the vacillation in New York see Thomas Gilpin to BF above, July 19.