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printing, in my native town, and afterward assisted to set up my business in Philadelphia by kind loans of money from two friends there, which was the foundation of my fortune, and of all the utility in life that may be ascribed to me-I wish to be useful even after my death, if possible, in forming and advancing other young men, that may be serviceable to their country in both these towns.

To this end I devote two thousand pounds sterling, which I give, one thousand thereof to the inhabitants of the town of Boston, in Massachusetts, and the other thousand to the inhabitants of the city of Philadelphia, in trust, to and for the uses, intents, and purposes, hereinafter mentioned and declared.

The said sum of one thousand pounds sterling, if accepted by the inhabitants of the town of Boston, shall be managed under the direction of the selectmen, united with the ministers of the oldest Episcopalian, Congregational, and Presbyterian churches of that town, who are to let out the same upon interest, at five per cent. per annum, to such young married artificers, under the age of twenty-five years, as have served an apprenticeship in the said town, and faithfully fulfilled the duties required in their indentures, so as to obtain a good moral character from at least two respectable citizens, who are willing to become sureties in a bond, with the applicants, for the repayment of the money so lent, with interest, according to the terms hereinafter prescribed; all which bonds are to be taken for Spanish milled dollars, or the value thereof in current gold coin; and the manager shall keep a bound book or books, wherein shall be entered the names of those who shall apply for and receive the benefit of this institution, and of their sureties, together with the sums lent, the dates, and other necessary and proper records, respecting the business and concerns of this institution; and as these loans are intended to assist young married artificers in setting up their business, they are to be proportioned by the discretion of the managers, so as not to exceed sixty pounds sterling to one person, nor to be less than fifteen pounds.

And if the number of appliers so entitled should be so large as that the sum will not suffice to afford to every one some assistance, these aids may therefore be small at first, but as the capital increases by the accumulated interest, they will be more ample. And in order to serve as many as possible in their turn, as well as to make the repayment of the principal borrowed more easy, each borrower shall be obliged to pay with the yearly interest one-tenth part of the principal; which sums of principal and interest so paid in, shall be again let out to fresh borrowers. And it is presumed that there will always be found in Boston virtuous and benevolent citizens, willing to bestow a part of their time in doing good to the rising generation, by superintending and managing this institution gratis; it is hoped that no part of the money will at any time lie dead, or be diverted to other purposes, but be continually augmenting by the interest, in which case there may in time be more than the occasion in Boston may require; and then some may be spared to the neighboring or other towns in the said State of Massachusetts, which may desire to have it, such towns engaging to pay punctually the interest, and the proportions of the principal, annually to the inhabitants of the town of Boston. If this plan is executed, and succeeds, as projected, without interruption for one hundred years, the sum will then be one hundred and thirty-one thousand pounds; of which I would have the managers of the donation to the town of Boston then lay out, at their discretion, one hundred thousand pounds in public works, which may be judged of most general utility to the inhabitants; such as fortifications, bridges, aqueducts, public buildings, baths, pavements, or whatever may make living in the town more convenient to its people, and render it more agreeable to strangers resorting thither for health or a temporary residence. The re maining thirty-one thousand pounds I would have continued to be let out to interest, in the manner above directed, for one hundred years; as I hope it will have been found that the institution has had a good effect on the conduct of youth, and been of service to many worthy characters and useful citizens. At the end of this second term, if no unfortunate accident has prevented the operation, the sum will be four million and sixty-one thousand pounds sterling, of which I leave one million and sixty-one thousand pounds to the disposition and management of the inhabitants of the town of Boston, and three millions to the disposition of the government of the State; not presuming to carry my views farther.

All the directions herein given respecting the disposition and management of the donation to the inhabitants of Boston, I would have observed respecting that to the inhabitants of Philadelphia; only as Philadelphia is incorporated, I request the corporation of that city to undertake the management, agreeable to the said directions; and I do hereby vest them with full and ample powers for

that purpose.

And having considered that the covering its ground-plat with buildings and pavement, which carry off most rain, and prevent its soaking into the earth, and renewing and purifying the springs, whence the water of the wells must gradually grow worse, and in time be unfit for use, as I find has happened in all old cities; I recommend that, at the end of the first hundred years, if not done before, the corporation of the city employ a part of the hundred thousand pounds in bringing by pipes the water of Wissahickon creek into the town, so as to supply the inhabitants, which I apprehend may be done without great difficulty, the level of that creek being much above that of the city, and may be made higher by a dam. I also recommend making the Schuylkill completely navigable. At the end of the second hundred years, I would have the disposition of the four million and sixty-one thousand pounds divided between the inhabitants of the city of Philadelphia and the government of Pennsylvania, in the same manner as herein directed with respect to that of the inhabitants of Boston and the government of Massachusetts. It is my desire that this institution should take place, and begin to operate within one year after my decease; for which purpose due notice should be publicly given, previous to the expiration of that year, that those for whose benefit this establishment is intended may make their respective applications; and I hereby direct my executors, the survivors and survivor of them, within six months after my decease, to pay over the said sum of two thousand pounds sterling to such persons as shall be appointed by the selectmen of Boston, and the corporation of Philadelphia, and to receive and take charge of their respective sums of one thousand pounds each for the purposes aforesaid. Considering the accidents to which all human affairs and projects are subject in such a length of time, I have perhaps too much flattered myself with a vain fancy, that these dispositions, if carried into execution, will be continued without interruption, and have the effects proposed; I hope, however, that if the inhabitants of the two cities should not think fit to undertake the execution, they will at least accept the offer of these donations, as a mark of my good-will, token of my gratitude, and testimony of my desire to be useful to them even after my departure. I wish, indeed, that they may both undertake to endeavor the execution of my project, because, I think that, though unforeseen difficulties may arise, expedients will be found to remove them, and the scheme be found practicable. If one of them accepts the money with the conditions, and the other refuses, my will then is, that both sums be given to the inhabitants of the city accepting; the whole to be applied to the same purposes, and under the same regulations directed for the separate parts; and if both refuse, the money remains of course in the mass of my estate, and it is to be disposed of therewith, according to my will made the seventeenth day of July, 1788.

My fine crab-tree walking-stick, with a gold head curiously wrought in the form of the Cap of Liberty, I give to my friend, and the friend of mankind, General Washington. If it were a sceptre, he has merited it, and would become it.

The Franklin School Medal Fund-Boston.

The legacy of one hundred pounds left by Franklin to the directors of the Free Schools of the Town of Boston, 'to which he owed his first instructions in literature,' was received and invested by the proper authorities in 1790, and since 1792 the interest has been invested annually in silver medals, and given as honorary rewards among the most deserving boys in the school or schools which are deemed to represent the public school which Franklin attended. The capital is now represented by one certificate of City of Boston five per cent. stock of $1,000. The silver medals are now distributed, at the annual examinations, to the most deserving boys in the English High and Latin Schools. 'One of the last things,' remarked Robert C. Winthrop in his address at the inauguration of the Franklin Statue, in Boston, in Sept. 17, 1856, 'which a Boston boy ever forgets is that he won and wore a Franklin Medal. There is at least one of them who would not exchange the remembrance of that youthful distinction for any honor which he has since enjoyed.'

The Franklin Young Married Artificers Fund-Boston. The legacy of one thousand pounds sterling left to the inhabitants of the town of Boston, for the encouragement of young mechanics, was received by the Selectmen in 1790, and the first loan was made in 1791. The amount of the

Fund, as reported by the Treasurer in the City Auditor's account, January 1, 1874, was $182,278.63-the interest collected in 1873 being $10,962.83.

The Philadelphia Mechanics Fund.

The legacy of one thousand pounds sterling left to the inhabitants of Philadelphia, was duly paid over to the proper authorities, but does not seem to have been very carefully managed. From the Report of the Committee of Legacies and Trusts made in the Common Council in 1837, it was difficult to ascertain the amount of the Fund at that date-'as the interest had not been promptly collected, and several of the beneficiaries had paid neither principal nor interest,'-its real value was estimated to be about $16,000. In 1875 the amount of the Fund was returned at $48,305.00; income for 1874, $3,425.86.

The Crab-Tree Walking Stick.

The staff of Franklin, the emblem of an honored old age reached through fifty years of public service, with the sword of Washington worn in his consummate manhood through the War of Independence, has passed into the keeping of the nation-both having been presented to the Congress of the United States on the 7th of February, 1843, by the nephew of General Washington, who felt that no individual should any longer claim private property in two such national relics. It was the privilege of John Quincy Adams, the venerable ex-President, who had known personally both Washington and Franklin, sitting in the House of Representatives as a member from Massachusetts, to move their acceptance.

The sword of Washington! The staff of Franklin! Oh, Sir, what associations are linked in adamant with their names? Washington and Franklin! What other two men, whose lives belong to the eighteenth century of Christendom, have left a deeper impression of themselves upon the age in which they lived, and upon all after time?

Washington, the warrior and the legislator! In war, contending, by the wager of battle, for the independence of his country, and for the freedom of the human race-ever manifesting, amidst its horrors, by precept and by example, his reverence for the laws of peace, and for the tenderest sympathies of humanity; in peace, soothing the ferocious spirit of discord, among his own countrymen, into harmony and union, and giving to that very sword, now presented to his country, a charm more potent than that attributed, in ancient times, to the lyre of Orpheus.

Franklin! The mechanic of his own fortune; teaching, in early youth, under the shackles of indigence, the way to wealth, and, in the shade of ob scurity, the path to greatness; in the maturity of manhood, disarming the thunder of its terrors, the lightning of its fatal blast; and wresting from the tyrant's hand the still more afflictive sceptre of oppression; while descending into the vale of years, traversing the Atlantic Ocean, braving, in the dead of Winter, the battle and the breeze, bearing in his hand the charter of Independence, which he had contributed to form, and tendering, from the selfcreated Nation to the mightiest monarchs of Europe, the olive branch of peace, the mercurial wand of commerce, and the amulet of protection and safety to the man of peace, on the pathless ocean, from the inexorable cruelty and merciless rapacity of war. And, finally, in the last stage of life, with fourscore Winters upon his head, under the torture of an incurable disease, returning to his native land, closing his days as the chief magistrate of his adopted Commonwealth, after contributing by his counsels, under the presidency of Washington, and recording his name, under the sanction of devout prayer invoked by him to God, to that Constitution under the authority of which we are here assembled, as the Representatives of the North American People, to receive, in their name and for them, these venerable relics of the wise, the valiant, and the good founders of our great confederated Republic-these sacred symbols of our golden age.

May they be deposited among the archives of our government! And may every American, who shall hereafter behold them, ejaculate a mingled offering of praise to that Supreme Ruler of the Universe, by whose tender mercies our Union has been hitherto preserved, through all the vicissitudes and revolutions of this turbulent world; and of prayer for the continuance of these blessings, by the dispensations of Providence, to our beloved country, from age to age, till time shall be no more!

In starting in 1727 the Junto, a club of young persons for mutual improvement, and in his Proposals for promoting Useful Knowledge in 1748, Franklin applied the principle of association to a field, and to modes of educational action far wider, and more beneficent than had yet been reached in any country.

The name Lyceum has been transferred from the local appellation of a building or grove, used for gymnastic exercises, in the suburbs of Athens. This was called the Lyceum, because it was near the temple of Apollo Lycius, "the destroyer of wolves" (Lukoi.) It was made over to Aristotle, to be used by him as a place for delivering his instructions, and as such became famous under its local name. The word was adopted in modern times, and made a generic term or common noun, to designate schools where the philosophy of Aristotle was taught, and subsequently in France to institutions for giving a higher grade of instruction to adults, upon a plan sometimes in whole or in part mutual or conversational, and thus somewhat similar to the lectures in which Aristotle gave his instructions at the original Lyceum.

These lectures are supposed to have been of two kinds; those which he delivered in the forenoon, to confidential-" esoteric"-hearers, on abstruse subjects in philosophy, nearly answering to theology, and on physics and dialectics; and, secondly, those which he delivered in the afternoon, to a less select or "exoteric " audience, which included rhetoric, sophistics, and dialectics, and were of a more popular character. Such courses of lectures, which were then usually given by philosophers eminent enough to be at the head of a school, corresponded in some measure to the collegiate or university education of the present day. Aristotle's instructions were delivered while he and his pupils walked about in the grounds of the Lyceum; and his school was under certain regulations for the preservation of order and decorum.

The name was applied to an institution opened in Paris, in 1786. Pilâtre de Rozier, the celebrated æronaut, and who perished by falling from his balloon, had some years before attempted to establish, under the name of "Museum," an institution for the improvement of adults, of which we find no very full account, but which seems to have resembled quite strikingly, in some of its chief features, the American Lyceum. It included a collection of natural objects, and a library. But it was pecuniarily unsuccessful, and was dissolved; the collection and books being sold. A number of gentlemen of literary taste, some little time afterward, associated themselves together to establish another institution, on a plan improved and enlarged from that of de Rozier's museum, and which they called the Lyceum. At the rooms of this institution, daily lectures were delivered by M. de La Harpe, an eminent author and critic, during the period from 1786 to 1794; when they were interrupted by his imprisonment, and were subsequently resumed for a time. These lectures were to some extent similar to our present popular lectures; or rather to the courses on the Lowell foundation, and sometimes to those before our various young men's institutes. They were of a popular character, and were attended by numerous audiences of the most fashionable people of the day. They were upon the history of literature, and included much collateral disquisition, and particularly criticism. The author subsequently published their substance, under the title of "Cours de Littérature." The work has become a standard one, and has been often republished, and variously edited, with notes and additions. The lectures of La Harpe appear to have constituted the principal instruction of the Lyceum, as the celebrity of the institution did not survive his connection with it.

The name has, during the present century, been applied in France to a class of schools corresponding to the gymnasiums of Germany, and the academies and public high schools of this country.

The Conservatory (Conservatoire) of Arts and Trades, in Paris, which originated with Vaucanson, in the reign of Louis XVI., but did not take specific shape

and action until 1796, embodies, in a systematic form, many of the ideas of the Lyceum, as proposed and labored for by Josiah Holbrook, for all classes of persons and interests, from 1828 to 1840. It has grown with the development of national industry, and the progress of science; and, aided by annual governmental grants, it has become consolidated into an institution. Its thirteen galleries of materials and of machines may be called the archives of industrial arts. Its lectures, scientific and practical, delivered in a large amphitheater, are crowded in the winter evenings by representatives of the working classes. Similar institutions, but resembling more the mechanic institutions of England, exist in the principal manufacturing towns of France.

MECHANICS' INSTITUTIONS. SOCIETY FOR THE DIFFUSION OF USEFUL KNOWLEDGE. The history of the Mechanics' Institution through all its phases of development, from the earliest young men's mutual improvement society established in London, in 1690, with the encouragement of Defoe, Dr. Kidder, and others, under the name of "Society for the Reformation of Manners"-the Society for the Suppression of Vice-the "Reformation Society of Paisley" in 1787; the Sunday Society in 1789, the Cast Iron Philosophers in 1791, the first Artizans' Library in 1795, and the Birmingham Brotherly Society in 1796, all among the working classes of Birmingham;-the popular scientific lectures of Dr. John Anderson, to tradesmen and mechanics in Glasgow, in 1793-the establishment of the Anderson's University at that place in 1796, and the incorporation into it of a gratuitous course of elementary philosophical lectures by Dr. Birkbeck in 1799, for the benefit of mechanics, the Edinburg School of Arts in 1821, the Glasgow Mechanics' Institute, the Liverpool Mechanics' and Apprentice's Library, and the London Mechanic Institution in 1823-which from this date, through the labors of Dr. Birkbeck, Mr. Brougham and others, spread rapidly all over the kingdom until there are now over 700 societies scattered through every considerable village, especially every manufacturing district in the kingdom, numbering in 1849, 120,000 members, 408 reading-rooms, and 815,000 volumes-constitute one of the most interesting chapters in the educational or social history of Great Britian.

In 1825, as one of the direct results of the extended and growing interest in mechanic institutions and popular libraries, the "Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge" was formed; which commenced immediately a series of cheap and useful publications in a great variety of subjects, and thus led the way to a new era in English literature-the preparation of books adapted in subject and mode of treatment, as well as in price, to the circumstances of the great mass of the people. In 1831, this society commenced a quarterly journal of education, which was discontinued in 1836, at the close of the tenth volume. In 1836, two volumes of essays on education, several of them delivered as lectures before the American Institute of Instruction, were published by this society. These twelve volumes, and the four volumes published by the Central Society of Education, composed of several of the most active and liberal-minded members of the former society, contributed a large mass of valuable information as to the organization, administration, and instruction of public schools in different countries, and prepared the way, in 1839, for the appointment of the Committee of Privy Council on Education. Besides these educational works, the society published other books, comprehended within the intended scope of its action, to the number, in all, of more than two hundred volumes. Among these were the "Penny Magazine;" the "Penny Cyclopedia;" a series of more than two hundred maps; a "Gallery of Portraits," in seven volumes; "Statistics of Great Britain," by Mr. M' Culloch, in five volumes; a complete series of agricultural works; two extensive series of volumes called the "Library of Entertaining Knowledge," and the "Library of Useful Knowledge," which were published in parts or pamphlets; De Morgan's "Differential and Integral Calculus," tables of logarithms and numbers, and of statistics on annuities, savings banks, and mechanics' institutes. The

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