I once purpos'd answering the abbe, and actually began the answer;
but, on consideration that my writings contain'd a description
of experiments which any one might repeat and verify, and if not
to be verifi'd, could not be defended; or of observations offer'd
as conjectures, and not delivered dogmatically, therefore not
laying me under any obligation to defend them; and reflecting
that a dispute between two persons, writing in different languages,
might be lengthened greatly by mistranslations, and thence
misconceptions of one another's meaning, much of one of the abbe's
letters being founded on an error in the translation, I concluded
to let my papers shift for themselves, believing it was better
to spend what time I could spare from public business in making
new experiments, than in disputing about those already made.
I therefore never answered M. Nollet, and the event gave me no
cause to repent my silence; for my friend M. le Roy, of the Royal
Academy of Sciences, took up my cause and refuted him; my book
was translated into the Italian, German, and Latin languages;
and the doctrine it contain'd was by degrees universally adopted
by the philosophers of Europe, in preference to that of the abbe;
so that he lived to see himself the last of his sect, except Monsieur
B----, of Paris, his eleve and immediate disciple.
What gave my book the more sudden and general celebrity,
was the success of one of its proposed experiments, made by Messrs.
Dalibard and De Lor at Marly, for drawing lightning from the clouds.
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