Note 93 — MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE OF DAVID RITTENHOUSE; ANTERIOR TO HIS SETTLEMENT IN PHILADELPHIA.

This great man, who was the son of Christian Huygens lord of Zuylichem, a counsellor of the prince of Orange, was born in the year 1629, at Zuylichem, in the province of Guelderland, the country of the ancestors of Rittenhouse. Having resided for some time in France, he quitted that country on account of his religion, in 1684, in consequence of the revocation of the edict of Nantes. He died in Holland in 1695, at the age of sixty-six years.

GalileoGalileo, who was a native of Florence, lived to the age of eighty-seven years. He died fifty-three years before Huygens; and about fourteen before Huygens’s application of the pendulum to clocks, so as to effect an isochronal regulation of their movements. Galileo’sGalileo’s use of the pendulum, for the purpose of measuring time, seems to have been nothing more than the annexation of a short pendulum to clock-work.