hyCkHstianHUygms 4S 
word of pendulum clocks haYing been offered to be sent, or 
been constructed, or eyen. attempted to . be constructed ;-r- 
circum stances ; which ; most > evidently , prove that Yi viani did 
not then consider Galileo as the: inventor of pendulum clocks, at 
least of such clocks as were actually made, and had been pro- 
ved to answer the purpose foriwhich they were intended. 
5. The last circumstance to be considered is the story of 
Becher^s. having met with a. person \Yho pretended having seen at 
Prague a pendulum clock made by Justus Borgen, an artist in 
the service of Rudolph the Second, and under the reign of that 
Emperor, that is between 1576 and 1612. I suppose Becher’s 
information to have been correct. Then it only follows, that at 
Prague a clock was seen, bearing the name of Borgen as maker, 
and having a pendulum. Nor is there any thing wonderful in 
this ; it might be seen in many places, for as the pendulum came 
to be substituted for the balances in all clocks, public and pri- 
vate, the rest of the work would remain with the makePs, name 
and date, if it had any, unaltered. Thus the clock on the top of 
the (now the Palace) of this city (Amsterdam) had, at 
the time of Becher’s visit to Holland, a perpendicular balance, 
though, for more than a century, the same work, is regulated by 
means of a very long pendulum. It is even possible that these per- 
pendicular balances, which seem not to have been so common as 
the horizontal ones (Becher says, having seen them on a large 
scale onlyheYQ)^ might be mistaken for pendulums by people 
not much’ acquainted with the details of the clockmaker’s art. 
At any rate,' if Borgen really constructed the clock sUch as it 
\Vas afterwards seen?, he must be held the discoverer not merely 
of the application of th e pendulum to clocks, but of the pendu- 
lum itself, as a means^ capable of measuring time ; for before 
1 612 Galileo had published nothing on this ' subject, nor were 
pendulums then used- by astronomers for that purpose. We 
know Borgen, or' Byrge as he is called by others, to have been 
an eminent maker of astronomical instruments, and Berthoud, 
(Hist: de la Mesure du Tempsi, tom. i. p. 37.), considers it as 
not improbable that he might have made these discoveries ; he 
says, ‘‘ Becher is not the only writer who attributes the applica- 
tion of the; pendulum^ to Byrge.” I have not been able, with 
the utmost pains, to discover who these other writers are, and 
