Autograph letter signed : London, to Joseph Banks, 1784 September 11.

Telling Banks that he had dined yesterday with Frederick Augusta Barnard, who "complained that for some time past the Arrets had not been sent regularly to the King's Library, which he desired me to mention to you, and sollicit your assistance to put them in order"; discussing the admission of Pierre Marie Auguste Broussonet to the Académie des sciences and various suggestions that Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton had made to Broussonet about letters of recommendation; mentioning that Daubenton thought that Banks had a regular correspondence with Jean-Baptiste Le Roy: "I told Dr. Broussonet that I imagined you did not; but that I would acquaint you with the contents of the letter he had received, knowing if any such opportunity presented itself you would gladly embrace it"; mentioning that Henry Smeathman had published "a puffing advertisement, as the prelude to a subscription for a balloon to be made by himself, on his new principles; which, I understand, he says were very unhandsomely treated by the Royal Society, to whom, though he was then in France, he shewed much eagerness to communicate them"; writing that Benjamin Franklin tells him that "a man in Paris has rowed a boat across the Seine in the air; that is, by turning a sort of whirligig which never touched the water. He went straight over in spite of the current, in a rather shorter time than boats usual go over with oars."