It appears, from an estimate of his estate made by himself, (and supposed to have been drawn up about a year before his death,) that all the property he ever acquired, independently of his patrimony, which he valued at one thousand pounds, actually cost him only 13,525_l._:[304] and the whole of his estate was estimated, at the time of his decease, at scarcely twenty thousand pounds. When it is considered, that the talents of this very extraordinary man were actively and industriously employed more than forty years, from the time he attained to manhood, during many years of which period, he was engaged in various public occupations, and some of them lucrative; that he was prudent and exact in all his transactions, private as well as public, and economical in his domestic expenditures; and that his family was small;—when all these considerations are taken into view, they furnish matter of surprize that he should not have accumulated a larger fortune! Indeed the moderate amount of the estate he left, affords reasonable grounds for supposing, that he devoted more of his property to purposes of beneficence, than the world had any opportunity of becoming acquainted with. ----- Footnote 304: Equivalent to 36,066⅔ American or Spanish dollars. ----- Dr. Rittenhouse survived both his sons-in-law; and their widows[305] are his only remaining children. He constituted these daughters, with Mrs. Rittenhouse, the executrices of his will. ----- Footnote 305: The elder of these ladies became, in the year 1788, the second wife of Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant, Esq. late an eminent lawyer in Philadelphia, and sometime attorney-general of Pennsylvania. This gentleman was one of the five persons delegated, on the 20th of February, 1776, by the convention of New-Jersey (where he then resided,) to represent that colony in congress: his colleagues were, the late governor Livingston, and John de Hart, Richard Smith, and John Cooper, Esquires. Mr. Sergeant died of the yellow fever in Philadelphia, on the 8th of October, 1793; after having been many weeks actively and benevolently employed, with a few other gentlemen of humanity, in the prosecution of such measures, as the sufferings of those of the citizens who had not fled, and the general welfare of the city required, at that calamitous period. He left issue a son and two daughters, by this marriage, besides several children by his first wife. The other daughter of Dr. Rittenhouse was married in the year 1790, to Nicholas Baker Waters, M. D. of Philadelphia, a young physician of respectable talents and amiable disposition. Dr. Waters died of a pulmonary disease, in August, 1794, at a very early age, leaving one son, an only child.