The latter was found in a cornfield, a mile and a-half from the river, but the former was never seen or heard of afterwards. valuable friends. Many in England entertain a very false idea of the Aborigines of Australia, regarding them as the lowest of the human race. That this is scarcely fair will, I think, be clear from the fact that they have invented a missile weapon which, if it fails to hit the mark, will return to the hand of the thrower— the boomerang—which, as well as their spears, they, like the Benjamites of old, will throw to a hair's breadth and will not miss. And if, in common with most savage tribes, they are both treacherous and remorseless in their animosity, they are constant and devoted in their gratitude, and frequently useful servants and Unhappily the white man, in his colonization, has not only introduced them to European arms and instruments, but to European diseases and vices, and erelong the Australian savage, with the Kangaroo and the Emu, may be looked on as the relics of a vanished age. Still, however, he is not yet extinct, and in all probability, by means of a wiser and more humane line of conduct than he has generally met with, the Australian might be preserved. I at least can see no reason why he might not become a highly respectable member of society, and possibly stand beside Lord Macaulay's famous New Zealander, to look from the ruins of London Bridge on what now is London, as we now survey the pyramids of Egypt or the Colosseum. Long may he be preserved and share with his splendidly plumaged birds, with his Emu and his Kangaroo, the silence and beauty of his own ancestral forests. VICISSITUDES OF SPECULATION.-Humboldt relates of a Frenchman, Joseph Laborde, that he went to Mexico, very poor, in 1743, and acquired a large fortune in a very short time, by the mine of La Canada. After building a church at Tasco, which cost him £84,000, he was reduced to the lowest poverty, by the rapid decline of those very nines from which he had annually drawn from 130,000 to 190,000 pounds weight of silver. With a sum of £20,000, raised by selling a sun of solid gold, which in his prosperity he had presented to the church, and which he was allowed by the Archbishop to withdraw, he undertook to clear out an old mine, in doing which he lost the greatest part of the produce of this golden sun, and then abandoned the work. With the small sum remaining, he once more ventured on another undertaking, which was, for a short time, highly productive; and he left behind him, at his death, a fortune of £120,000. THE VIKING'S DOOM. BY LAURENCE GOODCHILD. Near the high rocks of Tynemouth, dismasted, astrand, Or, worse, were resigned to the wrath of his train: Astrand in his bark on Northumbria's wild coast, And how looks that pirate? Is grief in his breast? Is fear in his glance, or his aspect confessed? Lo! sheathed in bright armour, on deck he appears, Is clenched round the naked and terrible brand, All the joy of the sea-king was Erlend's that day, Though an hour of existence was scarcely his own. As on her fair bosom his hand he reposed. Or wilt thou with me through eternity share The joys which the gods of our fathers prepare ; Be true, or the legends of Odin and Thor; Nor in heaven, nor in hell shall our spirits divide." His sword for an instant the chief shook on high, As the chieftain his broad blade entombed in her breast. Like a flow'ret first blighted by autumn's career, The weakness is over. All dripping with gore HALF-AN-HOUR ON THE CLOCK." BY JAMES CLEPHAN. MY subject is the clock, and my time is thirty minutes. The clock and I are to run a race; and he who matches himself against Time has not a moment to lose. Wasting no words, therefore, upon preface, I strike at once into my subject, and wag my tongue in competition with the pendulum. The clock is one of those common things with which we are all familiar, without knowing much of their history-without a thought, indeed, whether or not they have a history. We almost seem to fancy that they are a part of the natural order of things, and have existed from the beginning; or if we do not fall into so egregious an error, we have at least the vaguest notions as to the period of their origin; and should the painter or the poet, exercising his license, be unmindful of "Haydn," we are apt to be unconscious of the anachronism. We read the Julius Cæsar of Shakespeare, and are not surprised to hear the clock striking in Rome when midnight conspiracy is on foot in the orchard of Brutus: [Clock strikes. Brutus Peace! count the clock. We see, also, a painting of St. Jerome, who flourished in the fourth and fifth centuries; and it does not appear at all remarkable that the learned Father has a pair of spectacles on his nose, and that a clock-face and pendulum are figuring on his study wall. (Sir Thomas Browne's "Vulgar Errors.") Nor do we pause to reflect, when Fleance tells Banquo in the Highlands of Scotland that " he has not heard the clock," how very unlikely it was that he should. We take all these things as matter of course; and half-an-hour, therefore, cannot be unprofitably spent in shaking our too implicit faith in what we see and read, and making ourselves acquainted with the story of the clock. Dipping my pen, then, for your instruction-and my own-in Beckmann and other books, I enter on my measured course. One of the wits of the seventeenth century, who was wielding his feather after the Stuarts were gone, admonished the preacher in his pulpit, that if he discoursed like an angel, he would be tedious should he turn his sandclock more than once; and, mindful of the warning, I shall not turn my half-hour glass at all. It is true enough that measurers of time have in some sense always existed; for nature is full of them. The sun rises and sets, and Read some years ago before the Gateshead Mechanics' Institute, and now revised for the HOUSEHOLD MAGAZINE. there is succession of day and night; the earth journeys round the sun, and the seasons change with the revolving year; shade and sunshine surround us, and combine together to mark off our time, from morn to noon, from noon to night. "The servant, earnestly desiring his shadow," looks for the season of welcome rest. Man carries about with him, in his eclipse of the ground on which he treads, an index to the flight and progress of the day; and for Adam and Eve, who had no letters to post, no trains to catch, the heavenly horologe was chronometer enough. But the time came when man, more artificial in his ways, improved upon the hints of nature, and applied his wits to the construction of a dial-the sun clock; one form of which, as you have all read, was erected in Jerusalem so long ago as the reign of Ahaz, King of Judah. Damascus, whence he sent home the pattern of an altar, may have supplied him also with his dial. This, however, is but conjecture. Babylon is commonly regarded as the home of the dial-Egypt, Greece, and Rome following in its wake. In one of the comedies of Plautus (The Baotians), there is a friend of freedom, no fonder of set hours for meals than Sir Walter's "true philosopher," Edie Ochiltree, preferring to eat when he is hungry and drink when he is dry, and who anathematizes the man that introduced sun-dials, to chop and hack his days to mincemeat. When he was a boy his stomach was his clock, and told him when to dine; but now-a-days the city is full of these newfangled contrivances, and he can only fall-to when the sun gives leave. Now Plautus, who portrays this character, was born in the year 254 B.C.; and we may infer from his play that the device had been set up in Rome in the time of citizens then living; as the locomotive engine and electric telegraph have been brought into service in England in the memory of some who now hear me, and may look lingeringly back on the stage-coach or the Newcastle waggon. It is one of the drawbacks of a dial that it is only of use in the day-time, and when the sun is shining; and this most ancient of timemeasurers, once so universal, has shared the fate of not a few of the many inventions of our ancestors. It has passed into neglect, after gradually reaching its perfection, having assumed a variety of forms in its day, even that of a pocket-watch. To carry a chronometer-or measurer of time-has in all ages been a wish among the sons of men; and we gather from an Egyptian gossip, Athenæus by name, who lived in the third century of our era, that his contemporaries went about the streets with sand-clocks in their pockets; just as our illustrious north-countryman, Bishop Ridley, when he had done with time, and was disrobing for the life beyond, bore about him a portable sun-dial, and gave it as a parting memorial to a friend. My description of the sun-dial as being but a daylight chronometer, calls, perhaps, for some words of qualification; for it may be remembered against me, that When Hudibras, in haste he fell And found a watch, with rings and lockets, A moon-dial, &c. And on the occasion, also, of our war with China, some years ago, there was seen on one face of the Meridian Gate of Pekin a sun-dial, and a moon-dial on the other. Sun and moon dials were known in the Orient, the ancient home of our race, where man had of old time his hour-glass, with its falling sand, and his clepsydra, with its flowing water. It is difficult-often impossible-to get at the dates of discoveries or the beginnings of inventions. Of the infancy of the water-clock little is known. But Athens may have been its birthplace and its cradle. There was a practice among the Greeks, in their courts of law and justice, of assigning so much time to the bar and so much to the bench; just as the committee assign so much (and not too much) to me; but whereas, in Gateshead, mine is measured out by a watch, in Greece it was measured off by water. There was a vessel standing in court, with appropriate perforations, into which the appointed officer poured the quantum allotted to the counsel or the judge. As his lordship, or "my learned friend," was speaking, the water was oozing and dropping; but if any interruption occurred, by the reading of some document, or the starting up of an argument or a question, or "a scene in court," the flow was arrested; for there was a rule of law that neither counsel nor justice should have a drop too little or a drop too much. In the time of Aristophanes, who was born in the year 444 B.C., this usage was in vogue, and the orators and authors of Greece are frequent in their allusions to it. The wags founded on the flow of water and of words the joke that has come down to our own day for the benefit of clergy whenever the quarterjacks are heard too often between text and peroration. The Grecian warning to the wig was also adopted in the courts of Rome, and the transition would be natural to the introduction into general use of a water-clock. But as to how or where or when the clepsydra was contrived, we are not informed. Sometime, however, after the forensic arrangement was made in Athens, we hear of the water-clock in Europe; and it is on record that the Romans were setting up in their city, 159 B.C., a "public" water-clock, which should keep the inhabitants informed of the hour by night and by day, in sunshine and in cloud, and thus surpass in usefulness the sun-dial. But the clepsydra had its difficulties as well as the dial; and one of these consisted in a custom of the ancients not yet obsolete. Our hours, from midnight to midnight, are all of the same duration, while the hours of the ancients were of varying length. They divided their daylight into so many hours, and their night into the same number; and thus they had hours of differing duration every day; and all through the year their hours were daily altering in length. All through the year— save at two separate seasons. At the vernal and the autumnal equinox-and then alone--the hours of the olden time were of equal length the whole day round, like our own. This being so, the old clockmaker-the maker of the clepsydra-had to fashion his water-chronometer in such a manner that it would show the time through days and months of varying hours; and being as ingenious in his own day as the horologer is in ours, he succeeded in solving the problem. all professing and practising a pursuit of some serviceable sort. (Contemporary Review, July, 1879.) It was by a mathematician and mechanic of this great Egyptian mart, who, like our own Arkwright, had sprung by his genius from a barber's shop, that the clepsydra was perfected. Ctesibius gave it wheels; and setting them in motion by the flow of water, a small statue, ascending and descending, pointed its outstretched finger to a dial, and showed the hour; a connecting link, as it were, between the clock with water and the clock with wheels. Slow but sure was the course of the clepsydra. To the remotest East it made its gradual way. In the seventh century it reached Japan, at a time when a wave of improvement was passing over that country, under the sway of a reforming ruler, who was founding its first school before the birth of our Venerable Bede. Through the recent visit to Japan of Sir E. J. Reed, M.P., we have now the benefit of an instructive book, in which I find a few lines that belong to my subject:-"The Emperor Tenji [668-72], while yet a Prince, Noteworthy is the fact recorded in the invented and made a clepsydra; and when he "Narrative" of Mr. Oliphant, that when our came to the throne he placed it in a tower ambassador, the Earl of Elgin, was on his built for the purpose, and caused the hours to mission to Japan in 1858, the natives were still be struck by means of a bell or drum, as infollowing the practice of the great nations of dicated by a clepsydra." ("Japan: Its Hisantiquity, and dividing their days and nights tory, Traditions, and Religions," 1880.) by unequal hours; and those of you who had the advantage of attending the lectures in Newcastle of Dr. Macgowan, the medical missionary, in 1861, would see in his Japanese museum a timepiece adapted to this venerable division of the day. The horologers of Japan had been brought face to face with a nut that had been cracked on the Mediterranean two thousand years or more ago; and as the wit of man is much the same in all ages and in all climes, they too, in their North Pacific homes, were not baffled by the perplexity. Ancient is this partition of time, and modern too; for in Notes and Queries, where something of everything may any day be learnt, attention has been called to its lingering existence in remote corners of Europe. Such a clock, as we shall soon see, is still in existence in Asia, with beat of drum and sound of bell; for the clepsydra, continuing in use through a succession of centuries, is not, as some of us may have supposed, an extinct horologe. Flow of water and fall of sand, "kiss of wheels and stealing shade," overlap each other in the measure of our days; as the quill-pen and the pen of steel still compete for preference, and as the friction-lucifer strives in Polynesia with the ancient rubbing together of two pieces of stick. The late Chief Commissioner of British Burma, General Fytche, not long since saw, close to the eastern gate of the king's palace of Mandalay, "a lofty campanile, where the water-clock is placed "_" the day and night divided, each into four equal parts, and How wide a range the clepsydra covered in the number of hours 64." "At the end of each the ancient world may be inferred from the quarter a large gong and great drum, placed at fact that Pompey brought one back from the the summit of the tower, are beaten alternately, East to Rome, and that Cæsar is said to have to mark the quarter and number of the hour." carried off another from our own island. In ("Burma, Past and Present," 1878.) Nor is Egypt the water-clock was in common use, this the last remaining clock of its race. Not reaching its perfection in Alexandria; a city singular in the conservative East is the Burvisited by the Emperor Hadrian about the mese clepsydra. "The strangest sight in time when he was building Tyne Bridge; Canton," says Mr. Moseley in his "Notes on and while he was there he wrote home to his the Challenger" (1879), "is certainly the brother-in-law, describing the marvellous water-clock, where a constant attendant watches industry and ingenuity of the inhabitants, the sinking of the index attached to the float, some blowing glass, others making paper, and as the water slowly runs out, and, when an hour is reached, hangs out a board with the hour written upon it on the city wall, and sounds the time on a gong." Thus, then, twelve centuries after the reign of the Emperor Tenji-two thousand years subsequent to the time of Ctesibius the water-clock is seen loitering on the continent of Asia; while, at the same time, the Challenger finds the modern lucifer-match displacing the ancient mode of obtaining fire in the Tonga Islands. It was probably a clock akin to the chronometer of Canton or Mandalay that the sovereign of Persia presented to Charles the Great of France in the year 807. Some have been of opinion, but apparently in error, that it was a clock moving by wheels and weights. Certain it is that Hildemar, when addressing his admonitions to the monks in the same century, manifests no knowledge of such a measurer of time, but advises them, if they would duly perform their services and devotions, to have a water-clock; and the records of the monastery of Werden in Prussia, in the tenth century, make no mention of any kind of clock at all, the crowing of the cock timing the inmates in their prayers. (Beckmann's "History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins," Bohn, 1846.) Clocks, of whatever description, were at this period far from common in Europe; but we are evidently approaching, now, the birth and growth of a new time-measurer the clock with weights. There was born, at the close of the tenth century, one Peter Damian, who became in his manhood a Benedictine monk, and wrote a book (De Perfectione Monachorum), in which he treats, among other things, of the measurement of time, making no mention of the existence of any clock in his convent-the convent of Avellana, at the foot of the Apennines. He had a custom, of which he makes a note, of singing to himself whenever he wished to have a notion of the flight of time, that when the brightness of the sun or the position of the stars was obscured by the weather, he might form a sort of reckoning by the quantity of psalmody he had accomplished; and he speaks of his desire to construct a moving sphere, which should show the passage of the heavenly bodies and the progress of time. We may conjecture, therefore, that this ingenious and intelligent recluse, who rose in succession to the offices of abbot and cardinal, and finally returned to end his days in the retirement of his beloved cloisters, had become aware of the existence of astronomical clocks, and been inspired with an ambition to possess such a convenience in his convent. It was apparently about this time somewhere, it may be, in the eleventh century-the century of the Norman Conquest-that clocks moved by weights began to be used in Europe; and they are said to have come, as windmills and other ingenuities are said to have come, from the Saracens; but on such points we know little or nothing; we are left in dim uncertainty. Gradually, however, rays of light steal in. Some incidental allusion occurs, perchance, on an author's page, revealing to us the fact of a discovery or an invention of which no direct record has been made. So it is as to what we now call a clock. The first distinct intimation we receive of the introduction of such an instrument comes to us from a friar (Gulielmus Alvernus), who took his name from the Tuscan monastery of which he was a member, the cradle of the Franciscan order. He wrote a treatise, about the year 1230, on the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; and in illustration of his great argument he makes use of the works of a clock kept in action by a weight. There can be no doubt, therefore, that such a mode of measuring time was perfectly familiar to his readers. Another Italian author, the poet Dante (born in the year 1265), commemorates in his "Vision of Paradise" present kind of clock-a clock with circling wheels and tinkling sound-a monastic clock "that calleth up the spouse of God to win the bridegroom's love at matin hour." There were clocks, then, in Italy-striking clocks-in the thirteenth century. There were also clocks in England. We read, in the reign of Edward the First, of a lord chief-justice who, being guilty of some abuse of his office, was called upon, by way of penalty, to erect a clock in a tower of Westminster Hall. Clocks were now becoming common; and in the next century— the fourteenth-they are of frequent mention, and details of their construction appear. our Three Dutchmen, John Vueman, William Vueman, and John Lietuyt, of Delft, were in 1368 travelling in England with a protection from Edward the Third, to exercise their craft as clockmakers; and about the year 1370, Henry de Vick, a German, was putting up a clock in Paris for Charles the Fifth. Of this clock the details have survived to the present day; but I will not touch upon them, nor on the particulars of the balance-clock of Dover Castle existing in 1348, being mindful of the old proverb advising "the shoemaker to stick to his last." In the year 1371 the year after the horologe of De Vick there was stir and excitement in the belfry of the minster at York. The bell for the "clok" was to be renewed, with also the masons' bell. A new clock, too, had been ordered. An agreement was entered into with Sir John Clareburgh for the making of it, with all the appurtenances, except lead and the bell; and his charge was to be |
