I finished the second volume of Blackstone, and began upon the third which treats of private wrongs. And this evening I got through Buffon’s natural history of man, which is still more entertaining than the theory of the earth.
“16th.,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/03-02-02-0002-0012-0016. [Original source: The Adams Papers, Diary of John Quincy Adams, vol. 2, March 1786 – December 1788, ed. Robert Taylor J and Marc Friedlaender. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981, p. 318.]