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His interest in the mechanical arts and in scientific progress seems never to have abated. He writes in October, 1787, to a friend in France, describing his experience with lightning conductors and referring to the work of David Rittenhouse, the celebrated astronomer of Philadelphia.

And as they only go abroad to get letters they will hereafter go to Rittenhouse Square and I will write letters to them from London. All this shows that a simple hurriedly written letter from Richard Harding Davis is of more value than all the show places of London. It makes me quite PROUD. And so does this: "'Gallegher' is as good as anything of Bret Harte's, although it is in Mr.

Temple; "and, no doubt, a great many people would think it more useful to manufacture steam-engines, than to search out the system of the universe. Other great astronomers, besides Newton, have been endowed with mechanical genius. There was David Rittenhouse, an American,—he made a perfect little water-mill, when he was only seven or eight years old.

Brady was much disturbed in mind when Elizabeth came down-stairs. She exclaimed in horror, and tried to force the girl to go back, telling her it was a shame and disgrace to go in such garments into the sacred precincts of Rittenhouse Square; but the girl was not to be turned back. She would not even wait till her aunt and Lizzie came home. She would go now, at once. Mrs.

The theologians, as we have seen, estimated more justly the ability of their antagonist, the collaborator of Franklin, Rittenhouse, and Clymer, on whom the University of Pennsylvania had conferred the degree of Master of Arts, but the gentry confused Paine with the class described by Burke as "the swinish multitude."

Rittenhouse Smith's dinner-party emerge radiantly from the sombre perils which had beset it. It was a brilliant, unqualified success. Miss Winthrop was good enough to say, when the evening was ended saying it in that assured, unconscious way that gives to the utterances of Boston people so peculiar a charm "Really, Mrs.

This was a far more difficult operation than to draw a meridian line from a given point, such as the source of a river. It was thought in 1763 worthy of the attention of the first assistant in the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, and the American Rittenhouse was associated with him.

But when a man is wanted, and, especially, as in the case in point, a clever man, the matter very readily may become desperate. Mrs. Rittenhouse Smith certainly was dismayed, yet was she not utterly cast down.

She lived to see him rise in his profession, until he became a member of Congress, though she died before he reached the zenith of his renown. The same was true of David Rittenhouse, the famous mathematician. When he was but eight years old he constructed various articles, such as a miniature water-wheel, and at seventeen years of age he made a clock.

Waterworks, killed by the Croton and Cochituate; Ben Franklin, borrowed from Boston; David Rittenhouse, made an orrery; Benjamin Rush, made a medical system; both interesting to antiquarians; great Red-river raft of medical students, spontaneous generation of professors to match; more widely known through the Moyamensing hose-company, and the Wistar parties;-for geological section of social strata, go to The Club.