TIME 



5814 



TIME 



When the French took possession of the 

 town in 1894 it was almost wholly in ruins, but 

 under a new regime it acquired schools, Euro- 

 pean churches, modern streets, fortifications and 

 other innovations. It is an important Moham- 

 medan center of learning and contains several 

 mosques and a Moslem library. The people, 

 however, live in dreary clay huts. There is 

 through transportation service between Tim- 

 buktu by way of ocean steamer lines, the Sene- 

 gal-Niger Railway (Kayes to Koulikoro) and 

 small steamboat lines from Koulikoro to Tim- 



covery of America, or from the visit of Aunt 

 Susan to the week of the wheat harvest, or 

 from the breakfast hour to the ringing of the 

 school bell. Such duration we have learned to 

 divide into periods of certain length, which we 

 call years, months, days, hours, minutes and 

 seconds. 



The story of this careful development of the 

 means of reckoning duration, or time, leads 

 back thousands of years. Some early people 

 reckoned it by the sun, others by the moon. 

 The American Indians kept an account of long 



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DIFFERENCES IN TIME AROUND THE WORLD 

 it is noon in Chicago it is earlier or later west and east, as shown on the dials. 



When 



buktu. Population, about 5,100. See map, 

 facing page 81. 



TIME. The scientist says that what we call 

 time is the duration measured for all things, 

 with a beginning and an end between an eter- 

 jiity past and an eternity future. A man with 

 only the layman's viewpoint defined time in 

 this way: "Dost thou love life? Then do not 

 squander time, for that is the stuff life is made 

 of." A French philosopher declares that time 

 does not exist at all; that the past is gone and 

 is nothing; that the future is something which 

 may never be, and that all we have of duration 

 is the present indivisible instant, which is gone 

 before we can say, "It is here." 



The most common idea of time is a division 

 of duration counting from one event to another, 

 as from the death of Charlemagne to the dis- 



periods by "winters," of months by "moons" 

 and of days by "sleeps." They took no account 

 of weeks. When computed by the sun a day 

 was from sunrise to sunset; this was divided 

 into hours, but as the days were of unequal 

 length the hour varied in the different seasons 

 from forty-five minutes to seventy-five minutes. 

 At length the hourglass made it more con- 

 venient to divide the time from sunrise to sun- 

 rise into twenty-four equal parts. There was 

 no agreement as to when the day began, how- 

 ever. Some peoples counted the day from sun- 

 rise, some from sunset, others from midnight 

 and still others from noon. By general custom 

 we now declare the day to be from midnight to 

 midnight. 



It is always noon when the sun is directly 

 overhead. Actually, then, when it is noon at 



