On the 7th of the following month, Dr. Smith wrote thus finally, to Mr. Barton, on this subject—“Your and my friend, Mr. Rittenhouse, will be with you on Saturday. The Governor says, the Orrery shall not go: he would rather pay for it, himself. He has ordered a meeting of the Trustees on Tuesday next; and declares it as his opinion, that we ought to have the first Orrery, and not the second,—even if the second should be the best.”
[158]. The Rev. Dr. Peters wrote thus to Mr. Barton, under the date of March 22, 1771—“Dr. Smith has done wonders in favour of our friend Rittenhouse. His zeal has been very active: he has got enough to pay him for a second orrery; and the assembly has given him 300l. The Doctor, in his introductory lecture, was honoured with the principal men of all denominations, who swallowed every word he said, with the pleasure that attends eating the choicest viands; and in the close, when he came to mention the orrery, he over-excelled his very self!”—“Your son will acquaint you with all the particulars respecting it. The lectures are crowded by such as think they can, thereby, be made capable of understanding that wonderful machine: whereas, after all, their eyes only will give them the truth, from the figures, and motions, and places, and magnitudes of the heavenly bodies.”
[159]. The author of The Vision of Columbus, a Poem, (first published at Hartford in Connecticut, in the beginning of the year 1787,) alludes to the Rittenhouse-Orrery, and to the numerous resort of persons to the College-Hall, for the purpose of viewing that machine, in the following lines, (book vii.)
“See the sage Rittenhouse, with ardent eye,
Lift the long tube and pierce the starry sky;
Clear in his view the circling systems roll,
And broader splendours gild the central pole.
He marks what laws th’ eccentric wand’rers bind,
Copies Creation in his forming mind,
And bids, beneath his hand, in semblance rise,