In drawing up rules for the government of the Philosophical Society, Dr. Franklin advises that correspondence be maintained not only between the central organization and its members in the different colonies, but with the Royal Society of London and the Dublin Society. Thus persons residing in remote districts of the United States would be placed in direct communication with the latest discoveries of Old World scientists in all their lines of work. What such correspondence meant to men of intelligence, living far from the centres of education and enlightenment, in those days of few books and fewer magazines and journals, it is impossible for us to imagine. Many years later, when the French botanist, André Michaux, was appointed by his government to examine the trees of this continent, with a view to their introduction into France, he carried letters from the Philosophical Society to one of its members, living in Lexington, Kentucky. “During my stay at Lexington,” Michaux writes, “I frequently saw Dr. Samuel Brown, from Virginia, a physician of the College of Edinburgh, and a member of the Philosophical Society.... Receiving regularly the scientific journals from London, he is always in the channel of new discoveries, and turns them to the advantage of his fellow-citizens. It is to him that they are indebted for the introduction of the cow-pox. He had at that time inoculated upwards of five hundred persons in Kentucky, when they were making their first attempts in New York and Philadelphia.” Agreeable as it must have been to Michaux to find flowers of science blooming in these western wilds, we can imagine the even greater delight that such a man as Dr. Brown must have experienced in meeting and conversing with this foreigner, fresh from Old World haunts of learning, with his interesting budget of news, political as well as scientific. Those were the exciting days of the Consulate in France, when Lord Nelson was gaining victories for England in the Northern seas; and we can picture to ourselves these two learned gentlemen, seated before a great fire of logs, with a steaming bowl of punch, made from the famous Kentucky apple-jack beside them, turning away from the paths of science to discuss Napoleon’s victories, the coalition against England, and the assassination of the Emperor Paul in Russia, which was followed by a treaty between his successor and the English sovereign.