I am ashamed of how long it has been since I have had the honor of writing to you. At the time of the departure of Messieurs Magellan and Priestley, I had a letter ready to seal up; I then received a message on behalf of Monsieur Le Roy, announcing that on that very day his relative would bring me the eight louis that he owes you. I waited for him in vain, and I called on Monsieur Magellan two hours after he had left. Since that time, the same man has had the same promise repeated to me week after week, and has not yet kept it, although one of his female relatives pesters him almost continually on the subject. Your fine experiment with oil poured onto waves has met with a certain amount of incredulity here, but on the other hand several sailors have given testimony in favor of the experiment, from analogous facts that are well-known to them. Nonetheless I have not yet learned that any of our physicists has undertaken to verify these facts as of yet. You probably know what has been done in this regard by Mr. Allamand in Holland, and with what success. The successful method used by the seamen of Scheveningen persuades me more and more that the idea which came to a sailor of my acquaintance, Monsieur de Billy, is excellently conceived. He suggests that when two vessels meet each other at sea, and want to communicate by means of small boats, someone in the vessel that is above the wind should throw a little oil out into the channel between the two vessels, in order to smooth the waves and make it easier for the small boat to approach the other vessel, which is where the strongest waves are usually breaking.

I received two very interesting letters from Dr. Rush, one written in October and the other in November, which, along with various other good materials that you have kindly sent me, have put me in a position to undertake the project that I have been pondering for quite some time now: that is, to issue a kind of periodical based on correspondence between the two continents. I have decided to present the public with a series of letters, published in succession, that I am addressing to myself under the name of a Quaker in Philadelphia currently in London. By decking my Quaker in your feathers and those of your friends, and adding here and there a few of my own, as much for purposes of transition as for variety, I freely treat all kinds of subjects without compromising myself too much. The first of these so-called Letters of Samuel Jone is dated on the 9th of last September, the second on the 8th[?], and the third on the 12th, although I only began to write these letters in November. I am writing three letters per week, instead of two, until I have caught up with my dates: one letter for each Monday and Thursday. I have read several of them to various friends of different professions and different tastes, all of whom seemed to find them stimulating. I have asked for permission to have them published, and I was assigned a royal censor who let the boldest statements about the clergy pass with no difficulty. I would not have dared to say half so much on that topic only a year ago. He struck out a few words that might have displeased our magistrates, but that I gave up without reluctance. Thus I expect to submit the first collection of letters to the printer sometime this month, and to have the first issue of the periodical distributed on the first Monday of March. Each issue will have three leaves divided into twelve pages, and five issues will make a volume. I intend to circulate a short prospectus of it as soon as possible, and to send you some copies for your friends. But you must not abandon me solely to my own powers, dear friend; it would be difficult for me to find material for this enterprise, if you did not support me. Samuel Jone, from his first letters, makes me hope that you will. Everything in them is to your glory, and very few things to my own credit.

In the first letter you will find a comparison of Philadelphia and Paris that people here have liked, although it does not depict my country in a very flattering way. I hope that it will not displease you. You will see that the British Parliament is not spared in the fourth letter, but you will also see from what source I borrowed the features for my portrayal. You will find letters that are entirely my own, on the assassins of our ideas[?], on despotism, etc., but I am very much afraid that you will find these letters to be the weakest.