known as Nuremberg eggs. One,
supposed to have belonged to our wise-foolish
James the First, is of a flattish egg-shape, the
outer case plain, the inner elaborately engraved;
the face has a calendar, and wherewithal for
showing the moon's age. Another, existing in
a private collection, is an egg cut out of a
jacinth, with the dial-face visible through the
transparent jewel—a very beautiful mode of
indulging in these crotchets. In the Dover
Museum is a double-cased egg-watch with two
movable dials, one for showing the hours of
the day in the usual fashion, and the other
for the names and days of the month; there
are also means for denoting the day of the week
and the position of the sun in the zodiac;
and—an oddity indeed—the hands go the
reverse way from those in ordinary watches,
or from right to left, as if the artist's notion
of time took a backward direction. In
Hollar's set of four engravings of the Four Seasons,
a lady is represented in the character of Summer,
with an egg-watch suspended from her
girdle.

Surely the most dismal of all watches must
have been those shaped in the form of a skull or
death's head, intended doubtless as mementoes
of the fleetness of time and the brevity of man's
existence. Many examples of this class are
contained in various public and private collections.
One of these, small in size, is of silver, and has
a ring at the top to suspend it from the girdle;
the lower jaw of the skull opens, and there
displays the dial-face. Another of the doleful
family, made in the seventeenth century, opens
at the lower jaw to show what's o'clock, and
has inscriptions (" Incertite hora, " " Æsterna
respice") on the outside. When Diana of
Poictiers became mistress to Henry the Second
of France, she was a widow; and the courtiers
of the sovereign, to ingratiate themselves with
the favourite, wore death's-head watches as a
kind of complimentary mourning. But the most
celebrated death's-head watch, once belonging
to Mary Queen of Scots, was that which the
royal lady gave to Mary Seaton, her maid of
honour, and which afterwards came into the
possession of Sir Thomas Dick Lauder. It is
of silver gilt. The forehead of the skull bears
the symbols of death, the scythe, and the hour-
glass, placed between a palace and a cottage, to
show the impartiality of the grim destroyer; at
the back of the skull is Time destroying all
things, and at the top of the head are scenes of
the Garden of Eden and the Crucifixion. The
watch is opened by reversing the skull, placing
the upper part of it in the hollow of the hand,
and lifting the jaw by a hinge: this part being
enriched by engraved representations of the
Holy Family, angels, and shepherds with their
flocks. The works of the watch form the
brains of the skull, and are within a silver
envelope, which acts as a musically- toned
bell; while the dial-plate serves as the palate.
This very curious work of art, which was made
at Blois, is too large to be carried as a pocket
watch.

Some of the old watchmakers were remarkably
smitten with a taste for astronomy, dealing
with the heavenly bodies in a way which modern
watches seldom aspire to. There is an oval
silver watch by Dupont, with index hands to
show the hour of the day, the day of the week,
the day of the month, and the age of the moon,
while there are other arrangements for
denoting something about the constellations; and
inside the cover are a sun-dial and a compass.
Jean Baptiste Duboule, of Geneva, made
a large watch, which denotes the four parts of
the day, the hour of the day, the day of the
week, the day of the month, the name of
the month, the sign of the zodiac, the age
of the moon, the phase of the moon, and the
four seasons of the year; far too complex
probably, to be really reliable as an astronomical
guide, seeing that the smallest disarrangement
in any little wheel would throw sun, moon, and
earth into awful catastrophe. More practicable
was a watch made by a Polish peasant,
Kuhaiesky, at Warsaw, which denoted the time at
different places under different longitudes—a
contrivance which we have seen imitated in a
modern English watch. One of these mechanical
conundrums was found among the loot of
the Emperor of China's summer palace at Pekin,
when captured by the English; it was of the
time of Louis the Sixteenth, and is supposed to
have been presented to the Son of the Sun and
Moon by that sovereign; it was a telescope
enriched with pearls and enamels; but when
we are told that " the object-glass is formed of
a watch set with pearls," we confess to being
puzzled.

Some good people in past times affected the
wearing of watches in ways not often adopted just
now. Archbishop Parker, in a will drawn up in
Latin rather less than three centuries ago, said:
"I give to my reverend brother Richard, Bishop
of Ely, my stick of Indian cane which hath a
watch in the top of it." Several other walking-
stick watches are still preserved in collections of
bijouterie; while watches in rings are still more
common. One of the Electors of Saxony used
to have a watch in his saddle. The Earl of
Leicester gave to Queen Elizabeth, as a new
year's gift, " one armlet or shakell of golde, all
over fairely garnished with rubyes and
dyamondes, haveing in the closing thereof a clock,"
that is, having a watch in the clasp. The
courtly dames of those times often carried a
watch suspended to a chatellaine, with keys,
seals, miniatures, brologues, &c. Cruciform
watches were much coveted by pious persons,
who reverenced the symbolism embodied in
them. One such, about two centuries old, is
called a montre d'Abbesse, and is supposed to
have been made for the lady superior of a
religious house; its surface bears numerous
scriptural designs in relief. Another, however,
which was in the Bernal collection, had quite
as much heathenism as scripturalism about
it: seeing that it was engraved with figures of
Diana and Endymion. Once now and then
ladies wore watches in the form of a book, the