tricity, though I do not know that, like Franklin, he made his own electrical machine, in this city.[1] Mineralogy and manures, mesmerism and mathematics were also topics of his public discourses. The expоsitions of the orrery of Rittenhouse doubtless often aided to enlarge his audiences in those days. My old friend, President King, might have said more of him in his Memoir on the Croton Aqueduct.
As there were periods when he could not study, and hours when he could not lecture, the propensities of his old master roused him to new efforts as a traveller. He wandered through divers parts of Pennsylvania and this State, until he, by personal examinations and calculations, prepared a Book of Roads for New-York, which he published in 1789. I never heard from his lips any lamentations on his travels, or his gastric sufferings, such as old Mrs. Knight has recorded in her Tour through the Wilderness from Hartford to New-York, made some time before. Colles was a genuine philosopher; he had studied the Salernian precepts, and could practically declare that a hit in the morning was better than nothing all day.
Upon his final settlement in New-York, he at first lived by making band-boxes; whether his mathematics gave them more symmetry and grace, there is no one left to tell us. His support from this source was precarious, and other appliances were at work, in the manufacture of Prussian blue and other pigments, George Bazon commenced the Mathematical Correspondent, the first publication of that sort in the Union, and similar in its intentions to the work of Dr. Hutton. Baron was an English radical; and Colles, with a spice of democracy in him, must have found politics and mathematics and the social habits of Baron an occasional relief from his weightier cares. The almanac-makers at fault, Colles supplied their deficiencies in astronomical calculations; and he added to these avocations the collecting and arranging of opossum and beaver-skins, Indian vases and tomahawks, and other objects of curiosity with which he became familiar during his extensive western tours through the Mohawk country, and his interviews with the chiefs of Oneida Castle. He found a congenial friend in Gardiner Baker, who was then engaged in
- ↑ Colden Correspondence, when I examined it in 1810.
