2. JW enclosed an unsigned Sept. 5, 1775, letter from James Hutton that included an unattributed French verse intended for placement under a portrait of BF:

Hutton explained that Du Pont de Nemours had sent the verse to “a friend.” However, Turgot must have been the author, as he sent a close variant to Du Pont on June 5, 1776, with a request that Du Pont copy it and burn the original. The latter rendition included a new first line in Latin (Eripuit coelo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis) that would gain fame as an epigram. It was the only line ever published, perhaps because the French verse was seen as too subversive: XXVI, 670–1n; Gustave Schelle, ed. Œuvres de Turgot et documents le concernant, (5 vols., Paris, 1912–23), V, 494, 647; Alfred O. Aldridge, Franklin and his French Contemporaries (New York, 1957), pp. 124–35.

Hutton wrote that the last line was “too strong.” Americans continued to profess loyalty to the king, but renounced dependence on what they perceived as “unconstitutional Claims of the Ministers and their Dependants.”

3. Leonhard Euler proposed that “magnetic fluid” flowed in one direction, through infinitesimal pores in a magnet. His “Dissertatio de magnete” shared the annual prize awarded by the Académie des sciences for 1744. By 1784, Euler’s theory of magnetism was available in several different kinds of publications, and we cannot be certain which of them was being loaned here.

4. Robert (Bob) Alexander, then living with the Franklin household: XLI, 524n.