4. Massie (d. 1784) had amassed by 1764 a collection of some fifteen hundred economic treatises, printed during the past two centuries. He had drawn on these for his own prolific writings, which ranged in subject from taxes and interest rates to sailors’ wages and foundling hospitals; he was unusual among economists of the day in his emphasis on the importance of agriculture and in his compilation and use of statistics. DNB; William Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce... (2 vols., Cambridge, 1890–92), II, 384–90, 426–7. In March, 1772, BF subscribed £3 3s. for Massie’s “ Charts of Commerce” and in August, 1773, paid him £5 5s. for “Military Papers”; in between he lent or paid him £23 2s.; Jour., pp. 40–1, 43, 50. In April and May, 1774 (p. 54), he charged Massachusetts £36 19s. 11d. for pamphlets, some of which Massie had written. Worthington Ford assumed that this agreement concerned the pamphlets: Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., LVI (1922–23), 97–9. We differ, because of the other payments and because, as late as 1778, BF inquired about MSS that he thought Massie still had: Matthew Ridley to BF, Nov. 24, 1778, APS.

5. BF’s entry of the payment (Jour., p. 27) mentions only books. His receipt has been lost, and with it the conditions; but one of them might well have been delivery of the MSS and papers.