From Benjamin Franklin to James Logan, 17 December 1749
To James Logan
MS not found; reprinted from extract in Sparks, Works, VII, 40.
[December 17, 1749]
I send the Dialogues on Education, which I ascribed to Hutcheson, but am since informed they were wrote by Mr. Forbes, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen;1 the same who wrote the Inquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer. I also send Milton.2
1. BF and his informant were both mistaken in ascribing the “Dialogues on Education” to Francis Hutcheson in the preface of his Proposals (see above, p. 398): the author was David Fordyce, professor of moral philosophy in Marischal College, Aberdeen; his Dialogues concerning Education was published anonymously at London in two volumes, 1745–48. Nor was Fordyce the author of the famous Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London, 1735); that was written by his uncle, Thomas Blackwell the younger, professor of Greek and, after 1748, principal of Marischal College. DNB. See also BF to William Smith, May 3, 1753.
2. See above, p. 397 n.