Reasons for dissenting from the Report of the Committee appointed to consider of Mr. Wilson's Experiments. Including Remarks on some Experiments exhibited by Mr. Nairne. Read at the Royal Society, June 25, 1778.

Bookseller Notes

The highly promising career of Samuel Musgrave (1732-1780), Oxford (Corpus Christi) scholar, travelling Radcliffe fellow, and leading Euripides authority was blighted by his published accusation that notable members of parliament accepted French bribes to conclude the Treaty of Paris in 1763, a charge unsubstantiated and publicly discredited. Despite gaining medical degrees from both Leiden and Oxford and publishing a number of classical, medical and scientific works, his reputation never recovered and he died in penury. His contribution here, during a particularly productive period in the study of electricity, concerns the relative merits of pointed, blunt or spherical conductor terminations in avoiding explosions, with particular relation to the practical issue of lightning conductors. Arguing against Benjamin Franklin among others, he asserts that a sharp-pointed termination is not always the best option. Appearing in the Philosophical Transactions of the previous year, this off-print, the first separate edition, is uncommon: BL and Cambridge (St John's) in the UK, only one copy in the US (Huntington).