TIME KEEPING IN GREECE AND ROME.* 



By F. A. Seely, of the U. 8. Patent Office. 



In my room in tbe Patent Office there hangs a Connecticut clock of 

 ordinary pattern and quite imperfectly regulated. Its variation of per- 

 haps half a minute in a day, however, gives me no concern, since being 

 connected by wire with the transmitting clock at the Naval Observatory, 

 it is every day, at noon, set to accurate time. At the moment of 12 

 o'clock there comes a stroke on a little bell and simultaneously the 

 three hands, hour, minute, and second — whether they may have gained 

 or lost during the preceding twenty-four hours, fly to their vertical po- 

 sition. Immediately after I hear a chorus of factory whistles, sounded 

 in obedience to the same signal, dismissing the workmen to their mid- 

 day meal. At the same moment and controlled by the same impulse, 

 the ball, visible on its lofty staif from all the ships in New York Har- 

 bor, drops, and the seamen compare their chronometers for tlieir com- 

 ing voyage. The same signal is sent to railway offices and governs the 

 clocks on thousands of miles of track and determines the starting and 

 stopping and speed of their trains. It goes to the cities of the Gulf and 

 of the Pacific as well as to those of the Atlantic coast — noted every- 

 where as an important element in the safe, speedy, and accurate conduct 

 of commerce ; and so the work of the regulating clock of the Observa- 

 tory, sent out by means which note the minutest fraction of a second of 

 time, is playing its important part in the economy of our century. I 

 can not follow it out in detail; every one will do so to some extent in 

 his own mind. But if we were to divide human history into eras ac- 

 cording to the minuteness with which the passage of time is observed 

 in the ordinary affairs of life, we should lind ourselves to have arrived, 

 and very lately, in what might be called the era of seconds. 



At the opposite extreme is the period when the i)assage of day and 

 night reveals itself to the dullest intellect. Perhaps no savage people 

 have ever been so dull as not to have noted more than this. We can 

 hardly conceive a state in wbich the brutal hunter did not take note of 

 the declining sun and observe that the close of the day was approach- 



* Read before the Anthropological Society of Wasbingtou, April 5, 1887. (From the 

 American Anthropologist for January, 1888, vol. i, pp. 25-50.) 



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