"The year 1775 opened with a project intended to bring the abilities of Rittenhouse more effectually into the service of science. The Philosophical Society addressed the colonial legislature of Pennsylvania, praying it to establish a public observatory, and commit it to the care of Rittenhouse. Had the circumstances of the times permitted this project to be carried into effect, it would have enabled him to occupy a great space in the history of astronomy. He had already shown himself the equal, in point of learning and skill as an observer, to any practical astronomer then living; nothing was wanting to make him rank with the Flamsteads, the Halleys, and the Maskelynes, but that he should be permitted to devote his whole mind to this pursuit, and be furnished with those instruments and accommodations, for which no private fortune will suffice. Other men might have been found as well, nay, better qualified for the political pursuits and public offices in which it became his fate to spend the rest of his life; but America has never yet produced any individual who has manifested so great a capacity for extending the domain of practical astronomy. To arrange the details of a disorganized and depreciating currency, to collect and disburse a scanty and ill-paid revenue, were thereafter to be the pursuits of our philosopher; and he was to expend upon the estimates and returns of the tax-gatherer those powers of mind which were capable of grasping, and that mechanical skill which sufficed to imitate, the vast mechanism of the universe."