pilgrims, who were continually travelling to and
fro between England and France, would not
have allowed a whole century to elapse, without
bringing a specimen of the new invention to
this country. And yet Alfred devised a method
of computing time by means of a rushlight set
in a lantern. Anything more unsatisfactory
and more expensive than this it was impossible
to imagine. A rushlight, in those days, must
have cost two or three pence of our money;
and, as the process of refining tallow had not
then been discovered, there were no means
whatever of reckoning how long one of these
luminaries would take in burning. One might
very wellflicker and splutter for an hour,
whilst a second was just as likely to flame
away in ten minutes. It was not till the
reign of Edward the Confessor (1041-1066)
that the use of the hour-glass became pretty
general in England; and the first water clock
seen in this kingdom was one brought from
France by Richard CÅ“ur de Lion, a few years
before he ascended the throne.

We must now skip two centuries, during
which horology made no sensible progress, and
come to the reign of Charles the Fifth of
France, when the first real clock was set up.
This was in the year 1374. The maker was
one Henri de Vic, an Arab, who had been
converted to Christianity. This clock was a
monster machine, weighing five hundredweight.
It was moved by weights, was possessed of an
horizontal lever, and provided with a bell to toll
the time. There is a full description of it in
Froissart. It was put up in the round tower of
the royal palace (now the Palais de Justice),
and attracted enormous crowds every day for
several months after it had been erected. The
maker received a pension of a hundred crowns
of gold for life, and was ennobled. He is the
first artificer upon whom this distinction was
ever conferred in France.

From this time the making of large clocks
for public edifices was carried on very
extensively over Europe; but it was not until the
beginning of the sixteenth century that small
clocks were made for apartments. The first
we know of came from Florence, in 1518, as a
present from Julio di Medici (afterwards Pope
Clement the Seventh) to Francis the First of
France. It was also in this same sixteenth
century that horology was first applied to
astronomical calculations by Purbach, in 1500.
In 1560, the Danish astronomer, Tycho-Brahe,
the teacher of the great Kepler, set up in his
magnificent observatory of Craniesburg a
clock which marked both the minutes and
the seconds.

The invention of watches had preceded by
a few years that of small clocks. Our ideas
of a primitive watch are always associated
with a turnip; but it was not until the
seventeenth century, when the Scotchman,
Graham, invented the cylindrical escapement,
that watches assumed this respectable but
inconvenient shape. At first they affected all
sorts of fancy forms, such as those of acorns,
olives, walnuts, and crosses. They cost fabulous
sums of money, and were generally worn
as pendants hanging by a gold chain from
ladies' bracelets. Claude, wife of Francis the
First, had one so small that it was set in a ring.

Popular tradition ascribes the invention of
watches to Peter Hele of Nuremberg, in the
year 1490. But then it is a notorious fact that
King Robert of Scotland possessed one, so far
back as the year 1310. The only way in which
we can account for this discrepancy is by the
supposition that watches were originally
invented by a Scotchman, but that the maker
died suddenly without promulgating his secret.
German watches were not introduced at the
English court until 1597. The first seen in
England was worn by the beautiful Lady
Arabella Stuart.

It is to Hugens of Zulichem that the greatest,
we might almost say the last, progress in the art
of horology is due. But Hugens only caught up
an idea that had first occurred to the great
Galileo. Every one knows the story of the
lamp suspended to the vault of the cathedral
of Pisa, the oscillation of which caused the
astronomer to reflect that the isochronal
movements of pendulums might well be applied to
the measuring of time. Galileo was only a boy
when he stood watching the cathedral lamp
swing; but many years after, that is in 1630,
the thought came into his head again, and he
drew up a plan on paper for the making of a
pendulum clock. His invention went no further,
however, and the honour of putting his theories
into practice was reserved for Hugens, who,
in 1657, forwarded to the States General of
Holland the description of a timepiece,
constructed on the new principles. Its perfection
lay in the introduction of the pendulum and of
the spiral main-spring. The name of Hugens
deserves to be remembered, for his pendulum
clock is the most admirable and yet most simple
machine that has ever been invented.

The invention of spring pocket watches, such
as we now wear, is owing to the Englishman
Hooke, it dates from 1658; and eighteen years
after this, in the year 1676, the first repeating
watch was made at Amsterdam. From this
time until the present century, when
chronometers and stop-watches were invented, the
science of horology received no further developments;
neither do we well see how it can receive
any, unless some future Hele or some
future Hugens discover a method of making
clocks go by electricity without giving us the
trouble of winding.

In these days it is a mooted point as to which
is the best country in which to buy a watch or
clock. In the last century it was universally
admitted that the watches of Geneva were
unrivalled, whilst the sculptured wooden-case
clocks made in the Hartz mountains of
Germany had the reputation of being the surest
goers, as well as the most valuable in point of
artistic merit. Now-a-days, however, Geneva,
from wishing to make too cheaply, has somewhat
lost her prestige for making well, and Swiss
watches have come to be looked upon with some
disfavour, especially in England. The battle