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Commemorations of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), one of the pivotal figures in early modern British science and medicine, turn on the ambiguous relation between the production of natural knowledge and its commercial exploitation. This relation is neatly expressed by the caption that accompanies Godfrey Kneller’s portrait of Sloane (1716), which hangs in the Royal Society. The caption informs visitors that Sloane formed the foundation collection of the British Museum — and invented milk chocolate. It is to this inviting juxtaposition between collection and confection that this essay attends. Traces of Sloane’s sweet legacy are concentrated in West London. The Natural History Museum houses his original cacao specimen as part of the herbarium he assembled from the hundreds of plant species he brought back from the island colony of Jamaica to the imperial capital in 1689. Grand botanical and culinary narratives converge to make it the herbarium’s most prestigious species. Linnaeus used the engraving Sloane made of this sample for his authoritative designation of Theobroma cacao in 1753, making it typespecimen material.1 But Sir Hans Sloane’s Milk Chocolate and the Whole History of the Cacao

Cet essai considère une critique des expériences électriques de Benjamin Franklin, publiée anonymement à Londres en 1777. L'auteur s'interroge pour savoir s'il est légitime de regarder ces expériences comme « natural philosophy » dans la tradition d’Isaac Newton. Cette critique des lumières frankliniennes est considérée en connection avec les conflits de la Révolution américaine, les angoisses sociales sur la dextérité mécanique, et la hiérarchie géographique des savoirs. Les débats sur le caractère de la vraie philosophie naturelle qui touchaient les expériences de Franklin portaient également sur la constitution sociale, politique et géographique de l’autorité.This essay discusses a critical account of Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with electricity published anonymously in London in 1777. The fundamental question raised was whether Franklin’s famous experiments constituted legitimate natural philosophy in the tradition of Isaac Newton. This dim view of Franklinist enlightenment is linked to the conflicts of the American Revolution, social anxieties about mechanical ingenuity, and geographical hierarchies of knowledge-making. It is argued that debates over the legitimacy of the proper character of natural philosophy that addressed Franklinist science were also debates over the social, political and geographical constitution of authority.