approached nearer its maker than any man who has lived from the creation to this day.”
Barlow, the author of that ponderous poem the “Columbiad,” put in rhyme:
| “ | See the sage Rittenhouse with ardent eye |
| Lift the long tube and pierce the starry sky! | |
| He marks what laws the eccentric wanderers bind, | |
| Copies creation in his forming mind, | |
| And bids beneath his hand in semblance rise | |
| With mimic orbs the labors of the skies.” |
Two universities vied with each other for its possession, and after Dr. Witherspoon, of Princeton College, had secured it for £300, Dr. Smith, of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote, with a slight touch of spleen: " This province is willing to honor him as her own, and believe me many of his friends regretted that he should think so little of his noble invention as to consent to let it go to a village. Smith was mollified, however, by an engagement immediately undertaken to construct a duplicate, and he delivered a series of lectures on the subject to raise the money required. Wondering crowds went to see it, and after the Legislature of Pennsylvania had viewed it in a body, they passed a resolution giving Rittenhouse £300 as a testimony of their high sense of his mathematical geni1us and mechanical abilities, and entered into an agreement with him to have a still larger one made, for which they were to pay £400. It even found its way into the field of diplomacy, for when Silas Deane was in France endeavoring to arrange a treaty of alliance between that country and our own against Great Britain, he suggested to the secret committee of Congress that the orrery be presented to Marie Antoinette as a douceur. It was somewhat injured by the British troops while in Princeton during the war.
