deserve the place it held. He believed that any one who had acquired a
command of good English could learn any other modern language that he
really needed when he needed it; and this faith he illustrated in his
own person, for he learned French, when he needed it, sufficiently well
to enable him to exercise great influence for many years at the French
court. As the fruit of his education he exhibited a clear, pungent,
persuasive English style, both in writing and in conversation--a style
which gave him great and lasting influence among men. It is easy to say
that such a training as Franklin's is suitable only for genius. Be that
as it may, Franklin's philosophy of education certainly tells in favor
of liberty for the individual in his choice of studies, and teaches that
a desire for good reading and a capacity to write well are two very
important fruits of any liberal culture. It was all at the service of
his successor Jefferson, the founder of the University of Virginia.

Franklin's studies in natural philosophy are characterized by remarkable
directness, patience, and inventiveness, absolute candor in seeking the
truth, and a powerful scientific imagination. What has been usually
considered his first discovery was the now familiar fact that northeast
storms on the Atlantic coast begin to leeward. The Pennsylvania
fireplace he invented was an ingenious application to the warming and
ventilating of an apartment of the laws that regulate the movement of
hot air. At the age of forty-one he became interested in the subject of
electricity, and with the aid of many friends and acquaintances pursued
the subject for four years, with no thought about personal credit for
inventing either theories or processes, but simply with delight in
experimentation and in efforts to explain the phenomena he observed. His
kite experiment to prove lightning to be an electrical phenomenon very
possibly did not really draw lightning from the cloud; but it supplied
evidence of electrical energy in the atmosphere which went far to prove