Chagrined a little that we have been hitherto able to produce nothing in this way of use to mankind; and the hot weather coming on, when electrical experiments are not so agreeable, it is proposed to put an end to them for this season, somewhat humorously, in a party of pleasure on the banks of _Skuylkil_. Spirits, at the same time, are to be fired by a spark sent from side to side through the river, without any other conductor than the water; an experiment which we some time since performed, to the amazement of many. A turkey is to be killed for our dinner by the _electrical shock_, and roasted by the _electrical jack_, before a fire kindled by the _electrified bottle_; when the healths of all the famous electricians in _England_, _Holland_, _France_ and _Germany_ are to be drank in _electrified bumpers_, under the discharge of guns from the _electrical_ battery. An electrified bumper, a note to the letter explained, was a small thin glass tumbler, nearly filled with wine, and charged, which, when brought to the lips of a person, gave him a shock, if he was close-shaved, and did not breathe on the liquor. Another note states that the biggest animal that the experimenters had yet killed was a hen. A later letter to Collinson on the phenomena of thunder-gusts takes Franklin away from the Leyden Jar of the laboratory to the stupendous batteries of the outer universe--from the point of a bodkin to the lofty natural or artificial objects, upon which lightning descends from the illimitable sky. "As electrified clouds pass over a country," he remarks, "high hills and high trees, lofty towers, spires, masts of ships, chimneys, &c., as so many prominencies and points, draw the electrical fire, and the whole cloud discharges there." From this observation to the lightning rod was but a short step. Another letter to Collinson in the succeeding year brings us to the lightning rod in principle if not in name. Speaking of what a sea captain had said of luminous objects, which had settled on the spintles at the topmast heads of his ship before an electrical shock, and burned like very large torches, he says: According to my opinion, the electrical fire was then drawing off, as by points, from the cloud; the largeness of the flame betokening the great quantity of electricity in the cloud: and had there been a good wire communication from the spintle heads to the sea, that could have conducted more freely than tarred ropes, or masts of turpentine wood, I imagine there would either have been no stroke; or, if a stroke, the wire would have conducted it all into the sea without damage to the ship. In the same letter, there is an adumbration of his grandest experiment, when he speaks of the flash from two of his jars as "our mimic lightning."