SUPPLEMENTARY PAPERS. DD 
The dissertation of Mr. Sandford Fleming is of a more extended 
allgemeineren) character, and his propositions founded upon it, were 
Sustained by the approval of the Canadian Institute, at Toronto, and 
it is this body, by the intervention of the British Government, which 
has more widely circulated Fleming’s paper. Fleming directly advo- 
cates the acceptance of the meridian 180° from Greenwich as the first 
meredian for the whole earth, and the universal establishment of 
time reckoned upon this meridian for scientific purposes, and even 
for many of the relations of every day life. This time we may dis- 
tinguish as ‘ Cosmopolitan Time,” in distinction to local time. 
Fleming submits in his treatise different arguments in favour of the 
universal introduction of this Cosmopolitan Time, indeed mostly in the 
form of more generally expressed ideas which direct attention to this 
weighty question, and which can serve as the starting point for a 
more extended discussion. Above all things, he is desirous of obtain- 
ing from competent professional men of all countries, definite answers 
to the following two questions : 
1. Does the Time-zero or Prime Meridian, proposed in the memoir. 
appear suitable and of a nature to be adopted by all civilized nations ? 
2. If the Prime Meridian proposed give rise to serious objections 
would there be any other meridian better qualitied, and which would 
have more chance of being adopted by all the world? 
Special circumstances enable Herr Otto Struve to answer the first 
cf these questions, since as early as the 4th February, 1870, before 
the Geographical Society of St. Petersburg, he discussed the questions 
in connection with the first meridian, and exclusively from the geo- 
graphical point of view, with which he specially connected the 
interests of Cartography (map making and navigation). The simplest 
solution seemed to him to be to take as a first meridian, that of 
Greenwich. 
Struve sustained this expressed preference on one side by the his- 
torical claim of the Observatory of Greenwich which it has established 
from two centuries of super-eminent service to the cause of mathe- 
matical geography and the interests of shipping, and on the other 
hand from the consideration that the greater part of the present maps 
in use, especially sea-charts, are projected relatively to this meridian 
of Greenwich, and that about ninety per cent. of seamen refer their 
longitudes te this meridian. 
But, indeed, according to Otto Struve, there is the circumstance 
which declares itself against the common establishment of the meridian 
of Greenwich, as the first meridian, that it passes over three countries 
of Europe, Great Britain, France and Spain, likewise the continent 
of Africa, and that accordingly in different parts of Europe and 
Africa the longitudes would have different descriptions east cr west 
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