The great deficiencies in his education, as well as their causes, having been misconceived and incorrectly represented in some publications, a due regard to truth demands a correction of such mistaken opinions. Soon after his death, there appeared in the Maryland Journal, “_Anecdotical Notices of Mr. David Rittenhouse_;” which, although written with some ingenuity and knowledge of the subject, contained several errors. It is therein asserted, among other things, that “his parents, _incapable_ of giving him any other education than common reading and writing, intended to have brought him up to country-business; but, being blessed by nature with a mechanical turn of mind, he soon gave specimens of his ingenuity in making wooden clocks: This so recommended him to notice, as to give him an opportunity of learning the clock-making business.”—It has been already shewn, that Mr. Rittenhouse never received the least instruction in any mechanic art; and it is not ascertained that he ever made more than one wooden clock. It is also notoriously an error, that his parents were “incapable” of giving him any other education, than the common schooling he received: they were by no means poor, though not wealthy. His father inherited some patrimony; and he had, besides, been about nine years concerned in conducting the paper-manufactory near Germantown, after his one-and-twentieth year, before he purchased the Norriton farm.[82] This part of his estate he was enabled to give to his eldest son, David, about the year 1764; prior to which time the old gentleman removed to a farm he had purchased, nearly adjoining it in Worcester township, and on which he had erected a good two-story stone dwelling-house with suitable out-houses. There Mr. David Rittenhouse’s father and mother afterwards resided, together with their other son, Benjamin, (the house being so constructed as, conveniently, to accommodate two small families,) until the death of old Mrs. Rittenhouse in the autumn of 1777, at the age of seventy-three years, and of her husband in the autumn of 1780, in the seventy-eighth year of his age. The Worcester farm was left to the younger son: and, in addition to these not inconsiderable establishments for his sons, the old gentleman had given small portions to each of his five daughters, when they severally married. The remains of this worthy and upright man, for he truly merited that character, were interred in the cemetery belonging to a Baptist congregation, in the neighbourhood, in which both he and his wife had long attended divine worship. But, some years before his death, the old gentleman disposed of a lot of ground very near to his own house,—and _gratuitously_, if the writer’s information be correct,—to a Presbyterian congregation, for a burial place, and site for a church they were then about to erect. If this little piece of land was a _donation_ to the religious society to whom it belongs, the grant of it,