The Indian men, when young, are hunters and warriors; when old, counsellors; for all their government is by counsel of the sages; there is no force, there are no prisons, no officers to compel obedience or inflict punishment.... The Indian women till the ground, dress the food, nurse and bring up the children, and preserve and hand down to posterity the memory of public transactions. These employments of men and women are accounted natural and honourable. Having few artificial wants they have abundance of leisure for improvement by conversation. Our laborious manner of life, compared with theirs, they esteem slavish and base; and the learning on which we value ourselves they regard as frivolous and useless.... So he continued, by illustration and by example, to show that while Indian ways and customs were quite different from those of the white men, there was much to be said for them, and they were by no means always inferior. In fact, there was much which men who called themselves civilized could learn by studying the nature of those called savages. Some pieces in lighter vein were also run off his press, which Franklin wrote partly as an exercise in French, partly to entertain himself and his friends. In one of these bagatelles, as such pieces are known, he told Parisians of a discovery he had made whereby they could make great savings in the cost of candles and oil lamps. He had gone to bed one night, as usual at three or four hours after midnight, and had been awakened by a sudden noise at six, to find that his room was flooded with light! His servant had forgotten to close the shutters before he retired. Looking into his almanac, he learned what few others could know—that the sun rises early and “_that he gives light as soon as he rises_.” Another of his bagatelles was “Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout,” in which Gout explains his frequent and unwelcome visits as due simply to Franklin’s indolence; he plays chess too much and exercises too little. The “Ephemera” was printed as a bagatelle, and so was “The Whistle,” an expanded version of the little story he had once told his son William. His intellectual curiosity had not slackened during his years in France. War or no war, he continued to observe natural phenomenon, write and reflect on scientific matters, and keep up with the newest discoveries and inventions. He attended meetings of the Royal Society of Medicine, to which he had been elected in 1777, and of the French Academy of Science. In 1782, he watched Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier perform an experiment with the gas he had named oxygen—Joseph Priestley’s “dephlogistated air.” He wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, a Dutch scientist, about differences between the Leyden jar and Volta’s new electrophorus, and to Edward Nairne, an English friend, about the comparative humidity of the air in London, Philadelphia and Passy.