Depuis cette époque et pendant vingt-sept ans aucun événement, on pourrait dire aucun incident, ne dérangea plus Mdme. de Rumford dans sa noble et agréable façon de vivre. Elle n’appartint plus qu’à ses amis et à la société, tantôt étendue, tantôt resserrée, qu’elle recevait avec un mélange assez singulier de rudesse et de politesse, toujours de très-bonne compagnie et d’une grande intelligence du monde même dans ses brusqueries de langage et ses fantaisies d’autorité. In February 1812 Count Rumford gave his mother 10,000 dollars in 3½ per cent. stock as a free gift, and he wrote to her: I desire that you will accept of it as a token of my dutiful affection for you, and of my gratitude for the kind care you took of me in the early part of my life. I have the greatest satisfaction in being able to show my gratitude for all your goodness to me, and to contribute to your ease and comfort. I request that you will consider this donation as being perfectly free and unconditional, and that you would enjoy and dispose of what is now your property just as you shall think best and most conducive to your happiness and to your satisfaction, without any regard to any former arrangements you have made at my request. My health continues to be good, and I yet feel none of those infirmities of age which sometimes render the evening of life painful. I have the satisfaction to think that I have done my duty through life, and that is a great consolation to me as I approach the end of my course. I shall never cease to be, my dear mother, your dutiful and affectionate child, BENJAMIN. On January 23 he had a paper read before the Royal Society which he published as his seventeenth essay. It was an ‘Inquiry Concerning the Source of the Light which is Manifested in the Combustion of Inflammable Bodies.’ His object was to prove by decisive experiments that the light which accompanies the complete combustion of any given quantity of pure inflammable matter is variable, and therefore light cannot be one of the chemical products of combustion. If light were a substance, as has been supposed, it seems highly probable that means would long since have been found to discover where and how it exists; but if it be nothing more than a blow given to the eye by the repercussion of an ethereal fluid which touches that organ and at the same time every other body in the universe, it is evident that all attempts to discover it in a state of combination must be vain. Nobody, I imagine, ever thought of searching for sound in a fulminating powder. Is it more reasonable to search there for the light that accompanies the combustion of substances?