Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/590

Rh 570 R I T R I T Ritschl must be assigned a place in the history of learning among a yery select few. His studies are presented principally in his Opuscufa collected partly before and partly since his death. The Trinummus (twice edited) was the only specimen of his contem- plated edition of Plautus which he completed. The edition has been continued by some of his pupils Goetz, Loewe, and others and is still (1885) in progress. The facts of Ritschl's life may be best learned from the elaborate biography by Otto Rlbbeck (Leipsic, 1879). An interesting and discriminating estimate of Kitschl's work is that by Lucian Mueller (Berlin, 1877). (J. S. R.) RITSON, JOSEPH (1752-1 803), was the most militant and ill-tempered, and at the same time one of the most learned and accurate, of the antiquaries of the 18th century. Born at Stockton-on-Tees, of a Westmoreland yeoman family, in 1752, he was bred to the law, and settled in London as a conveyancer at the age of twenty-two. Already he had shown eccentricity of temper, had become a fierce apostle of vegetarianism, and a zealous student of anti- quities. His first notable publication was in 1782, an attack on Warton's History of English Poetry. The fierce and insulting tone of his Observations, in which Warton was treated as a showy pretender, and charged with cheating and lying to cover his ignorance, made a great sensation in literary circles. In nearly all the small points with which he dealt Ritson was in the right, and his corrections have since been adopted, but the unjustly bitter language of his criticisms roused great anger at the time, much, it would appear, to Ritson's delight. In the following year Johnson and Steevens were assailed in the same uncere- monious fashion for their text of Shakespeare. Bishop Percy was next subjected to a furious onslaught in the preface to a collection of Ancient Songs (printed 1787, dated 1790, published 1792). The only thing that can be said in extenuation of Ritson's unmatchable acrimony is that he spared no pains himself to ensure accuracy in the texts of old songs, ballads, and metrical romances that he edited. His collection of the Robin Hood ballads is perhaps his greatest single achievement. Scott, who admired his industry and accuracy in spite of his temper, was almost the only man who could get on with him. On one occasion, when he called in Scott's absence, he spoke so rudely to Mrs Scott that Leyden, who was present, threatened to " thraw his neck " and throw him out of the window. Spelling was one of his eccentricities, his own name being an example : Ritson is short pronunciation for Richardson. He died in 1803. RITTENHOUSE, DAVID (1732-1796), astronomer, was born at Germantown, Pennsylvania, on April 8, 1732. First a watchmaker, he afterwards became treasurer of Pennsylvania and (from 1792) master of the United States mint ; he was largely occupied in settling the boundaries of several of the States. As an astronomer, Rittenhouse's principal merit is that he introduced the use of spider lines in the focus of a transit instrument. His priority with regard to this useful invention was acknowledged by Troughton, who brought spider lines into universal use in astronomical instruments (see Von Zach's Monatliche Cor- respondenz, vol. ii. p. 215), but Felice Fontana (1730- 1805) had already anticipated the invention, though no doubt this fact was unknown to Rittenhouse. He died on 26th June 1796. RITTER, CARL (1779-1859), the greatest geographer of modern times, was born at Quedlinburg on August 7th, 1779, and died in Berlin, September 29th, 1859. His father, a physician of some local eminence, having died, leaving his family in somewhat straitened circumstances, Carl, along with an elder brother and a young man, Johann Gutsmuths, who had been his private tutor, was re- ceived into the Schnepfenthal institution then just founded by Salzmann for the purpose of putting his educational theories to the test of experience. Gutsmuths, who had continued to teach his pupils without remuneration after their father's death, remained their special guardian and instructor at Schnepfenthal, and in his letters to their mother every little detail of their mental development is affectionately recorded. The Salzmann system was practi- cally that of Rousseau : conformity to natural law and en- lightenment were its watchwords ; great attention was given to practical life ; and the modern languages were carefully taught to the complete exclusion of Latin and Greek. In 1787 Gutsmuths reports about Carl that, "while not much of a hand at making money [trading with counters for coin was a regular branch of the Schnepfenthal education], he draws better maps than the biggest boys, and is making great strides towards becoming a professor of geography." When his school days were drawing to a close his future course was^determined in a curious way by an introduction to Bethmann Hollweg, a banker in Frankfort. It was arranged that Ritter should become tutor to Hollweg's children, but that in the meantime he should attend the university at his patron's expense. In October 1796 he accordingly bade adieu to Schnepfenthal, and his next two winters were spent at Halle, where he resided in the house of Professor Niemayer, then at the height of his fame, and attended the lectures of Riidiger on statistics and science, Sprengel on European history, Meinert on scientific agri- culture, &c. His duties as tutor in the Hollweg family began at Frankfort in 1798 and continued for the next fifteen years. In one matter he went directly counter to the Salzmann theory : he gave a large place to the study of the ancient classics, of which he had grown passionately fond. The years 1814-1819, which he spent at Gottingen in order still to watch over the welfare of his pupils, were those in which he began to devote himself exclusively to geographical inquiries. In accordance with a promise exacted by Pestalozzi (with whom he had become acquainted at Yverdun on one of his many tutorial tours) he had several years previously drawn up a manual of physical geography in which many features of his later work are to be traced, but the book was not published. He now brought out his first masterpiece, Die Erdkunde im Verhdltniss zur Natur undzurGeschichte des Menschen (Berlin, 2 vols., 1817-1818). In 1820 he was called to be professor extraordinarius of history at Berlin, where shortly afterwards he began also to lecture on statistics at the military college. He remained in this position till his death. The service rendered to geography by Ritter was mainly three- fold. His personal influence, due largely to the moral character of the man and partly to the skill of the teacher, was unusually potent on those who came within its range during the long years that he acted as a professor. Had he done nothing more than use this influence in disseminating the geographical ideas of his time he would have stood high with his own generation. But, secondly, his investigations and teaching were informed by a fresh concep- tion of his subject which imparted life to what had been its dry bones and dust. Geography was, to use his own expression, a kind of physiology and comparative anatomy of the earth : rivers, moun- tains, glaciers, &c. , were so many distinct kinds of organs, each with its own appropriate functions ; and, as his physical frame is the basis of the man, determinative to a large extent of his life, so the structure of each country is a leading element in the historic pro- gress of the nation. This naturally led him to attach great import- ance to the vertical as distinguished from the horizontal develop- ment of the earth's surface, and also to give perhaps quite as much attention to the history of civilization and of the individual animals and plants by which civilization has been affected as to questions of purely physical geography. And, thirdly, he was a scientific compiler of the first rank. Such portions of his universal geography as he completed remain each the standard thesaurus for its territory. This is especially the case with the sections devoted to Palestine and to Central Asia. Among Hitter's minor works may be mentioned VorhaUc europaischcr VolkcrgeschicMen wr Herodot (Berlin, 1820) ; Die Stupas. . . . an dcr indobaktrischen Konigsstrasse u. d. Kolosse von Bamiyan (1838) ; Einleitung zur allgemeincn vergleichendcn Geographic (Berlin, 1852) ; " Bemerk- ungen iiber Veranschaulichuugsmittel raumlicher Verhliltnisse bei graphischen Darstellungen durch Form u. Zahl," in the Trans, of the Berlin Academy, 1828. After his death Daniel published selec-