From Benjamin Franklin to Ezra Stiles, 2 June 1757
To Ezra Stiles
ALS: Yale University Library
New York, June 2. 1757
Dear Sir,
Having waited here near Eight Weeks for a Passage to England, we are at length told we shall certainly sail tomorrow.
For your Amusement I enclose you a Copy of a Letter I lately sent to a philosophical Friend in Carolina.6 I shall not forget your Thermometer,7 and shall be glad to hear from you when in England. I am, Dear Sir, with great Esteem, Your most obedient Servant
B Franklin
Addressed: For / The Revd. Mr Ezra Stiles / at / Newport / Per Mr James / Franklin.
Endorsed: Recd. 9th. June 1757. Ansd. a second Time Mar. 30. 17588
6. To Dr. John Lining; see above, pp. 184–90.
7. When BF returned to Philadelphia in 1762 he brought a thermometer which he then sent to Stiles. BF to Stiles, Dec. 19, 1762, Yale Univ. Lib. Stiles’s careful thermometric observations, 1763–95, were probably made on this instrument. Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (New Haven, 1962), pp. 134–6.
8. Stiles replied to BF, July 12, 1757, discussing the letter to Lining, but the ship on which he sent his long communication was captured. He wrote again March 30, 1758, and that letter, too, was lost through enemy action, but partial drafts of both letters survive in the Stiles Papers. See below, pp. 239–43, 393–7.