The Rev. Jooathan Odell, also a loyalist, contributed to Rivington's Royal Gazette, of New York, for September 8th, 1779, a long poem on “The Word of Congress,” which contains the following :
| “ | There dwelt in Norriton's sequestered bowers |
| A mortal blessed with mathematic powers. | |
| To whom was David Rittenhouse unknown? | |
| Fair Science saw and marked him for her own. | |
| His eye creation to its bounds would trace, | |
| His mind the regions of unbounded space. | |
| Whilst thus he soared above the starry spheres, | |
| The word of Congress sounded in his ears; | |
| He listened to the voice with strange delight, | |
| And swift descended from his dazzling height. | |
| Then mixing eager with seditious tools, | |
| Vice-President-elect of rogues and fools, | |
| His hopes resigned of philosophic fame, | |
| A paltry statesman Rittenhouse became.” |
Though the public affairs with which he was associated would have been sufficient to have exhausted the energies of a man of even more than ordinary abilities, and must necessarily have engrossed much of his attention, it must not be supposed that he abandoned his astronomical and philosophical studies. At the suggestion of Colonel Timothy Matlack, the Assembly, in April, 1781, granted him £250 for an observatory, which he erected probably at that time in the yard attached to his residence, at the north-west corner of Seventh and Arch streets, in Philadelphia, and which Lalande says in his Astronomie in 1792 was the only one in America. The publications of the American Philosophical Society contain between the years 1780 and 1796 no less than seventeen papers written by him upon optics, magnetism, electricity, meteors, logarithms and other mathematics, the improvement of time-keepers, the expansion of wood by heat,
