“ honour they have done themselves, in chusing you one of their Members.

"With this you will receive several Diplomas for foreign Gentlemen in different Parts of Europe, which I imagine you may convey to them thro’ the Ministers of different Courts residing at Paris; and hope you will excuse my giving you this Trouble . . . I send herewith the 2 ^d. Vol of our Transactions, which please to accept.”

Jefferson’s answer is dated from Paris December 23: “ I have recieved your favor of Oct. 8. but the volume of the transactions mentioned to come with it, did not; but I had received one from m ( ^~ r) Hopkinson. you also mention the diplomas it covered for other persons, and some order of the society relative to myself, which I suppose were omitted by accident & will come by some other conveiance. so far as relates to myself, whatever the order were, I beg leave to express to you my sense of their favor & wish to merit it . . . ”

On February 4, 1787, Jefferson was distributing the diplomas to the European recipients, and on the copy of the letter (signed by him and in the Jefferson Papers in the Library of Congress) sent to Christian Frederick Michaelis, M.D. of Gottenberg, he has listed the names of the twenty-five new European members.

On February 6, 1788, Jefferson wrote to James Madison for copies of the first two volumes, which he wished to present to the Apostolic Nuncio in Paris, Count Dugnani: “ I will beg the favor of you to send me a copy of the American philosophical transactions, both the 1 ^st. & 2 ^d. volumes, by the first packet . . . ”

On July 11, Jefferson wrote to Count Dugnani: “ I have the honor of sending your Excellency the second volume of the American Philosophical transactions which came to my hands yesterday--my correspondent writes me that the first volume cannot be bought at this moment, the depot in which they were kept having been destroyed during the war. but he adds that they propose to reprint the first volume and that he will take care to send me a copy for you as soon as it shall appear . . . ””

The receipt of the book, with a request for the second adition [ sic -- Ed. ] of the first volume, was acknowledged by Dugnani the next day.

In the interval between the publication of the second and third volumes, Benjamin Franklin had died and had been succeeded as President by David Rittenhouse, and Thomas Jefferson, now Secretary of State, was one of the three Vice-Presidents.

This volume (article no. XXXIX, page 328) contains A Description of a new Standard for Weights and Measures, in a letter from Mr. John Cooke, of Tipperary in Ireland, to Thomas Jefferson, Esq.

David Rittenhouse died on June 26, 1796, and on January 6, 1797, Jefferson became the President of the Society, and was annually re-elected to that office until his resignation in November 1814. Jefferson’s letter accepting the Presidency, dated from Monticello January 28, 1797, and of which a defective letter-press copy is in the Jefferson Papers in the Library of Congress, is printed at the beginning of the fourth volume.

The death of Rittenhouse had delayed the appearance of volume IV, and on August 1, 1796, Benjamin Smith Barton, one of the officers of the Society, wrote to Jefferson, and after informing him of the death of the President, continued: “The 4th vol. of the Transactions of our Philosophical Society is now in the press. About 150 pages are printed off. Your account of the bones lately discovered, will be very acceptable to us. It will be in time, if we receive it within the term of five or six weeks from this time . . .”

This article is no. XXX in the volume, page 246: A Memoir on the Discovery of certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia. By Thomas Jefferson, Esq.

Article no. XXXVII in the same volume is: General Principles and Construction of a Sub-marine Vessel, communicated by D. Bushnell of Connecticut, the inventor, in a letter of October, 1787, to Thomas Jefferson then Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States at Paris.

Bushnell’s original letter to Jefferson is in the Jefferson Papers in the Library of Congress.

Article no. XXXVIII is The description of a Mouldboard of the least resistance, and of the easiest and most certain construction, taken from a letter to Sir John Sinclair, President of the board of agriculture at London . This letter from Thomas Jefferson (the signature printed at the end) is dated from Philadelphia, March 23, 1798. A letter-press copy is in the Jefferson Papers in the Library of Congress. For the mouldboard of least resistance see chapter VII, Agriculture.

The first three volumes of these Transactions were