Note 306 — THE CONCLUSION: COMPREHENDING A RETROSPECT OF THE LIFE OF DAVID RITTENHOUSE,

Dr. Rush has very beautifully expressed the same sentiment, in a passage of his Eulogium on our philosopher. After remarking, that his bodily infirmities “contributed much to the perfection of his virtue, by producing habitual patience and resignation to the will of heaven, and a constant eye to the hour of his dissolution,” he says: “It was a window through which he often looked with pleasure towards a place of existence, where, from the increase and perfection of his intuitive faculties, he would probably acquire more knowledge in an hour, than he had acquired in his whole life, by the slow operations of reason; and where, from the greater magnitude and extent of the objects of his contemplation, his native globe would appear like his cradle, and all the events of time, like the amusements of his infant years.” Such, too, must have been the ideas, impressed on the mind of Rittenhouse himself, when, in the morning of his life, he imagined the angel Gabriel looking down from the seat of perfect knowledge, and viewing, benignly, far from beholding with a smile of contempt, the efforts of Newton, to demonstrate the actual motion of our earth. W. B.