——­Physiologists and metaphysicians have had their attention turned a good deal of late to the automatic and involuntary actions of the mind.  Put an idea into your intelligence and leave it there an hour, a day, a year, without ever having occasion to refer to it.  When, at last, you return to it, you do not find it as it was when acquired.  It has domiciliated itself, so to speak,—­become at home,—­entered into relations with your other thoughts, and integrated itself with the whole fabric of the mind.  Or take a simple and familiar example.  You forget a name, in conversation,—­go on talking, without making any effort to recall it,—­and presently the mind evolves it by its own involuntary and unconscious action, while you were pursuing another train of thought, and the name rises of itself to your lips.

There are some curious observations I should like to make about the mental machinery, but I think we are getting rather didactic.

——­I should be gratified, if Benjamin Franklin would let me know something of his progress in the French language.  I rather liked that exercise he read us the other day, though I must confess I should hardly dare to translate it, for fear some people in a remote city where I once lived might think I was drawing their portraits.

——­Yes, Paris is a famous place for societies.  I don’t know whether the piece I mentioned from the French author was intended simply as Natural History, or whether there was not a little malice in his description.  At any rate, when I gave my translation to B.F. to turn back again into French, one reason was that I thought it would sound a little bald in English, and some people might think it was meant to have some local bearing or other,—­which the author, of course, didn’t mean, inasmuch as he could not be acquainted with anything on this side the water.

[The above remarks were addressed to the schoolmistress, to whom I handed the paper after looking it over.  The divinity-student came and read over her shoulder,—­very curious, apparently, but his eyes wandered, I thought.  Seeing that her breathing was a little hurried and high, or thoracic, as my friend, the Professor, calls it, I watched her a little more closely.—­It is none of my business.—­After all, it is the imponderables that move the world,—­heat, electricity, love.—­Habet.]

This is the piece that Benjamin Franklin made into boarding-school French, such as you see here; don’t expect too much;—­the mistakes give a relish to it, I think.

LES SOCIETES POLYPHYSIOPHILOSOPHIQUES.

Ces Societes la sont une Institution pour suppleer aux besoins d’esprit et de coeur de ces individus qui ont survecu a leurs emotions a l’egard du beau sexe, et qui n’ont pas la distraction de l’habitude de boire.