Instead of declining, it can truly be said that the reputation of Franklin as an electrical investigator and writer has increased with the progress of electrical science. "We shall, I am sure," remarks Professor J. J. Thomson in his _Electricity and Matter_, "be struck by the similarity between some of the views which we are led to take by the results of the most recent researches, with those enunciated by Franklin in the very infancy of the subject." Nor should we omit a tribute of Dr. William Garnett, in his _Heroes of Science_, in regard to the statements in Franklin's first letters to Collinson. "They are," he says, "perfectly consistent with the views held by Cavendish and by Clerk Maxwell, and, though the phraseology is not that of modern text-books, the statements themselves can hardly be improved upon to-day." If Franklin achieved a higher degree of success in the electrical than in any other scientific field, it was partly, at any rate, because he never again had the opportunity to give such continuous attention to scientific pursuits. To him this was at times a source of very great disappointment. In one of his letters to Beccaria, dated Sept. 21, 1768, he tells the latter that, preoccupied as he was, he had constantly cherished the hope of returning home, where he could find leisure to resume the philosophical studies that he had shamefully put off from time to time. In a letter, some eleven years later, from Paris, to the same correspondent, he said that he was then prevented by similar distractions from pursuing those studies in which he always found the highest satisfaction, and that he was grown so old as hardly to hope for a return of the leisure and tranquillity, so necessary for philosophical disquisitions. To Sir Joseph Banks he was inspired some years later, by recent astronomical discoveries, made under the patronage of the Royal Society, to write: "I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the happiness of knowing what will be known 100 years hence," Indeed, to him, leisure, whether only the seclusion of a thirty-day voyage across the Atlantic, or the final cessation of public life, was but another term for recurrence to his scientific predilections. When he received his leave from Congress to return home from Paris, he wrote joyously to Ingenhousz: "I shall now be free of Politicks for the Rest of my Life. Welcome again my dear Philosophical Amusements." There was, to use his own expression, still too much flesh on his bones for his countrymen to allow him any time except for political experiments; but, for proof of the eager interest that he felt in science, and of the prominent position, that he occupied in the scientific world of America, until the last, we need go no further than the fact that, when he died, the meetings of the American Philosophical Society had, for some time, been held at his home in Philadelphia.