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82 should consider that the world has but one Rittenhouse, and never had one before. . . . Are those powers, then, which, being intended for the erudition of the world, are, like air and light, the world's common property, to be taken from their proper pursuit to do the commonplace drudgery of governing a single State — a work which may be executed by men of ordinary stature, such as are always and everywhere to be found?” The royalist party were fully as reluctant to see him participating in political affairs, and their sense of the loss to science would seem to have been equally as keen. A Tory poet published in the Pennsylvania Evening Post, December 2d, 1777, these lines: