The general use of the common clock ought not to derogate from the ingenuity of an invention of such universal importance in the affairs of human life. The pendulum-clock now in use was brought to some degree of perfection, if not invented, by Huygens,[93] who was one of the first mathematicians and astronomers of the age in which he lived: and the date of this invention is about the middle of the seventeenth century; although Galileo disputed with him the discovery, a few years earlier. Clocks of _some_ kind date their antiquity much higher; some writers pretending to carry their invention back as far as the year 510 of the Christian era. However, on the authority of Conrad Gesner,[94] the honour of inventing the clock, before the application of the pendulum to these machines was made by Huygens, belongs to England: He says, that “Richard Wallingford, an English abbot of St. Albans, who flourished in the year 1326, made a wonderful clock by a most excellent art; the like of which could not be produced in all Europe.”[95] This was forty-six years before Henry de Vic, a German, made his clock for Charles V. king of France; and fifty-six years before the duke of Burgundy ordered one, which sounded the hour, to be carried away from the city of Courtray, in Flanders. ----- Footnote 93: This great man, who was the son of Christian Huygens lord of Zuylichem, a counsellor of the prince of Orange, was born in the year 1629, at Zuylichem, in the province of Guelderland, the country of the ancestors of Rittenhouse. Having resided for some time in France, he quitted that country on account of his religion, in 1684, in consequence of the revocation of the edict of Nantes. He died in Holland in 1695, at the age of sixty-six years. Galileo, who was a native of Florence, lived to the age of eighty-seven years. He died fifty-three years before Huygens; and about fourteen before Huygens’s application of the pendulum to clocks, so as to effect an _isochronal_ regulation of their movements. Galileo’s use of the pendulum, for the purpose of measuring time, seems to have been nothing more than the annexation of a short pendulum to clock-work. Footnote 94: