Since Franklin's father was a member of one of Mather's "Associated Families" and since Franklin as a boy read Mather's _Essays_ with rapt attention,[i-83] and since his _Rules for a Club Established for Mutual Improvement_ are amazingly congruent with Mather's rules proposed for his neighborly societies, it is not improbable that Franklin in part copied the plans of this older club. One also wonders whether Franklin remembered Defoe's suggestions in _Essays upon Several Projects_ (1697) for the formation of "Friendly Societies" in which members covenanted to aid one another.[i-84] In addition, M. Faÿ has observed that the "ideal which this society [the Junto] adopted was the same that Franklin had discovered in the Masonic lodges of England."[i-85] Then, too, in London during the period of Desaguliers, Sir Hans Sloane, and Sir Isaac Newton, he would have heard much of the ideals and utility of the Royal Society. Many of the questions discussed by the Junto are suggestive of the calendar of the Royal Society: Is sound an entity or body? How may the phenomena of vapors be explained? What is the reason that the tides rise higher in the Bay of Fundy, than the Bay of Delaware? How may smoky chimneys be best cured? Why does the flame of a candle tend upwards in a spire?[i-86] The Junto members, like Renaissance gentlemen, were determined to convince themselves that nothing valuable to the several powers of life should be alien to them. They were urged to communicate to one another anything significant "in history, morality, poetry, physic, travels, mechanic arts, or other parts of knowledge."[i-87] Surely a humanistic catholicity of interest! Schemes for getting on materially, suggestions for improving the laws and protecting the "just liberties of the people,"[i-88] efforts to aid the strangers in Philadelphia (an embryonic association of commerce), curiosity in the latest remedies used for the sick and wounded: all were to engage the minds of this assiduously curious club. Above all, the members must be "serviceable to _mankind_, to their country, to their friends, or to themselves."[i-89] The intensity of the Junto's utilitarian purpose was matched only by its humanitarian bias. Members must swear that they "love mankind in general, of what profession or religion soever,"[i-90] and that they believe no man should be persecuted "for mere speculative opinions, or his external way of worship." Also they must profess to "love truth for truth's sake," to search diligently for it and to communicate it to others. Tolerance, the empirical method, scientific disinterestedness, and humanitarianism had hardly gained a foothold in the colonies in 1728. On the other hand, the Junto members were urged, when throwing a kiss to the world, not to neglect their individual ethical development.[i-91] Franklin's humanitarian neighborliness is associated with a rigorous ethicism. The members were invited to report "unhappy