49 



walls filled with dry sand and its door joints packed with 

 felt. Here is the record of the performance of a sister 

 clock by the same makers in the Liverpool Observatory. 

 After making the correction for barometric pressure the 

 average of the daily rates in 1876 for the month of March 

 was six one-hundredths of a second ; for April, five hun- 

 dredths ; for May, seven hundredths ; for June, eight 

 hundredths; for July, eight hundredths. 



Before showing how these clocks are used for distribu- 

 ting public time, let us consider for a moment the perfor- 

 mance of watches and chronometers. I suppose that six 

 men out of seven consider the subject of the performance 

 of watches their specialty. At least it has been my for- 

 tune to meet a number of gentlemen with costly watches 

 which ran so well that they were superior to the finest 

 astronomical clocks. This somewhat surprising result 

 was obtained by accepting their sincere testimony that in 

 six weeks their watches actually had not varied a second. 

 And one gentleman informed me, with some evident em- 

 barrassment, that he had detected an error of some twenty 

 seconds in the time received from the Observatory which 

 he had heretofore supposed to be very exact. 



We are here reminded of Charles Dudley Warner's 

 words: "We constantly compare our watches, and are 

 anxious that they should not gain or lose a second. A 

 person feels his own importance increased if he owns an 

 accurate watch. There is nothing that a man resents more 

 than the disparagement of his watch. (It occurs to me, 

 by the way, that the superior attractiveness of women, 

 that quality of repose and rest which the world finds in 

 them, springs from the same amiable laisser aller that 

 suffers their watches never to be correct. When the day 

 comes that women's watches keep time there will be no 

 peace in this world.) When two men meet, one of the 



ESSEX INST. BULLETIN. 4 



