Note 58 — MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE OF DAVID RITTENHOUSE; ANTERIOR TO HIS SETTLEMENT IN PHILADELPHIA.

Conradus Rittershusius was a learned civilian of Germany. He was born at Brunswick in the year 1560, and died at Altorf in Switzerland, in 1613. Two of his sons, George and Nicholas, also distinguished themselves in the republic of letters. The writer of the present memoirs is too little acquainted with the genealogies of either German or Dutch families, to pretend to claim any consanguinity between this C. Rittershuysen (or, as latinized, Rittershusius,) and our Rittenhouses. But the name appears to have been, originally, the same; and the ancestors of both, it may be presumed, were of the same country: In giving a latin termination to the name, the y is omitted, not being a Roman letter.