Along the British Pacific Cable. 315 



From Fiji I sailed for Queensland, Australia, passing en 

 route New Caledonia, known as a French penal colony and for 

 its large deposits of nickel. 



In Australia, the land of sunshine and drought, of gold 

 and sheep, of eucalypti and rabbits, of kangaroos and emu, 

 of possibilities and development, of inverted nature, the 

 astronomer finds a transparent sky. In the land of the Maori — 

 New Zealand — across the ever-restless Tasman Sea, the element 

 from the antarctic and tropics struggle with each other for 

 supremacy to the detriment of the star-gazer. 



Hitherto the basal longitude for both Australia and New 

 Zealand had been brought eastward from Greenwich the inter- 

 national zero meridian, via Madras and Signnpore, so that 

 joining that circuit at Sydney to the one across the Pacific com- 

 pleted the first astronomic girdle of the world, and further- 

 more showed how well the astronomer could proceed step by 

 step, ever determing his distance from Greenwich, until he met 

 his fellow astronomer (at Sydney) coming from the opposite 

 direction, and question his position on the earth. The supreme 

 moment had arrived. Is the east longitude of the one the 

 complement of the west longitude of the other ? Does the 

 girdle they have made fit, or is it too small or too large ? 

 Thousands and thousands of miles of cable and land lines had 

 been used to transmit the pulsations of the clocks, many links 

 had been forged to complete the chain, many hundreds of stars 

 had been called from heaven to record their constancy, and skil- 

 fully the astronomer had welded the whole into one structure. 



But no work of man is perfect, eternal vigilance is the 

 price of precision. When the longitude brought from the west 

 closed at Sydney with that from the east, the discrepancy was 

 about a tenth of a second of time ; the two astronomers had 

 started in opposite directions around the earth to meet each 

 other, travelling across seas and continents, and finally found 

 their respective trysting places within the same area not larger 

 than an ordinary town lot. May we say, this was a measure 

 of the quality of their work ? The world was girdled astrono- 

 mically. 



