342 Nations lately become Literary. 



to flourish for some time, and was the means of 

 forming a number of good scholars, and distin- 

 guished professional characters. When it began 

 to decline, the Rev. Mr. Roan, a learned and 

 able divine, also of the Presbyterian church, erect- 

 ed another academy at Neshaminy, in the vicinity 

 of the former. Mr. Roan, as well as his prede- 

 cessor, is entitled to grateful remembrance for his 

 zeal and success in promoting useful knowledge. 



About this time also Mr. Tiieophtlus Grew," 

 from England, Mr. Annan, from Scotland, and 

 "Mr. Stevenson, from Ireland, set up grammar 

 schools in Philadelphia, in which the dead lan- 

 guages were taught with great skill and assiduity, 

 Mr. Grew was the first person in Pennsylvania 

 who undertook to teach the English language 

 grammatically. By the aid of these teachers some 

 of the oldest and most respectable inhabitants of 

 Pennsylvania, now living, were initiated into the 

 elements of English and classical knowledge. 



About the year 1740 the Rev. Dr. Francis 

 Allison opened an academy for teaching the 

 Latin and Greek classics and the sciences at New- 

 London, in Chester county, Pennsylvania.™ Here 

 he began that course of public instruction, and that 



carried on being built of logs. Mr. Tennent had four sons, Gilbert., 

 William, John, and Charles, who were all distinguished and useful 

 clergymen, and whose praise has long been in the churches. 



u Theophilus Grew was probably a son or grandson of the celebrated 

 botanist bearing the same name, who, in 1676, first suggested the sexual 

 doctrine of vegetables to the Royal Society of London. The former was 

 much distinguished as a mathematician, and was afterwards professor of 

 mathematics in the college of Philadelphia. 



iv The Rev. Francis Allison, D. D. was born in Ireland, in the year 

 1705. He received an excellent classical education at an academy in the 

 north of that kingdom, under the particular inspection of the bishop of 

 Raphoe, and afterwards completed his studies at the university of Glasgow. 

 He came to America in 1735, and was the pastor of a Presbyterian 

 church in Chester county, Pennsylvania, until about the year 1 753, when 

 he was chosen rector of the academy in Philadelphia. Besides an unusually 

 accurate and profound acquaintance wich the Latin and Greek classics, he^ 

 was well informed in moral philosophy, history, and general literature.. 

 He died in 1779, in ths seventy-fourth year of his age. 



