cover being pierced to show the hours on the
dial.

All sorts of ingenuity were exercised in
selecting the materials, forms, and arrangements
of watches. They were, as is well known,
brought into use as substitutes for the hour-
glass which was wont to be carried by professors,
judges, and other persons who required
easy means of determining the lapse of an hour
or any aliquot part of an hour. When the real
watch was first introduced there was no metal
chain connected with the mainspring, its place
being supplied by catgut. A watch of this kind
was given by Mary Queen of Scots to an
attendant on the night before her execution.
Some of the watches were made of crystal, to
render the beautiful mechanism of the works
visible. Some have had the twelve letters of
the maker's or owner's name to do duty for the
twelve figures on the dial. Some were
pedometer watches, one form of which is still used.
Napoleon had one that wound itself up by means
of a weighted lever which rose and fell at every
step; but those now made are for measuring
speed in walking, which can only be useful
to those who make regular steps of given
length, a known number of which equal a mile.
Some are touch watches, to be used in the
dark or by blind persons. There are twelve
projecting studs round the rim of the case; an
index hand, at the back, when moved forward,
stops at the portion of the hour indicated by
the dial; and the index and studs together
enable the time to be felt by the fingers.

The attempts to produce sounds of various
kinds in a watch have been numerous. The
celebrated French maker, Breguet, was famous
for repeating watches of this kind; and the
sovereigns of Europe were ready enough to give
him two or three hundred guineas for one. Of
course alarums are more simple, seeing that, the
mechanism is required merely to ring a bell at
some definite and pre-arranged hour in advance.
Charles the First kept an alarum watch at his
bedside at night; the outer case enclosed two
silver bells which struck the hours and quarters.
M. Rangouet, a French maker, about a century
ago, is credited with the construction of a
musical watch, of the common pocket size,
which played duets, and the works of which
were so nicely adjusted that the musical por-
tion and the time-measuring portion did not
interfere with each other. This is far surpassed
by a watch, about the size of an egg,
constructed by a Russian peasant in the time
of the Empress Catherine the Second, and now
preserved in the Academy of Sciences at St.
Petersburg. This elaborate work is both a
repeating watch and a watch that performs a
chant. Inside is a representation of the tomb
of Christ, with Roman sentinels on guard.
On pressing a spring, a stone rolls away from
the tomb, the sentinels fall down, angels appear,
holy women enter the sepulchre, and sing the
same chant which is still sung in the Russo-
Greek church on Easter Eve. A story is told
of some missionaries at Tongataboo which
shows that the exhibitors of talking and singing
watches are apt to find their own reputation
rise and full with that of the mechanism itself.
The real instrument was a cuckoo clock, but
it would apply to watches as well. The natives
believed that the missionaries' cuckoo clocks
were inhabited by a spirit, and regarded them
accordingly with reverential awe. One of them,
bolder than the rest, picked one of the clocks
to pieces to have a peep at the spirit. Of
course he could not put it together again; and
the fame of the missionaries was damaged when
it was found that they also were powerless in
the matter. There is some mention made of
watches which actually talked, emitting articu-
late sounds in the form of words; but this we
deem doubtful. Vocalisation or singing is a
very different affair; this can unquestionably be
done by pieces of mechanism much smaller than
a pocket watch—as the Swiss Nightingale at
the last Great Exhibition testified.

One recorded watch was very big—viz. that
which was made for the Irish giant, about
eighty years ago; the works were very strong,
and the watch with the seal and key weighed
nearly a pound. Far more numerous, however,
have been the tiny watches, marvellous on
account of the quantity of mechanism compressed
within small spaces. One of these is about the
size and shape of an almond. At the first of our
Great Exhibitions, the Swiss exhibited a watch
only three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter,
inserted in the top of a pencil-case; it showed hours,
minutes, seconds, and the day of the month.
An English specimen, the size of a threepenny-
piece, was a giant to it. The Annual Register,
about a century ago, told of a watch only the
fifty-fourth part of an inch in diameter; but
this, we suspect, must be a mistake for fifty-four
hundreds of an inch—a very different affair.
Arnold presented to George the Third an
exquisite watch of the size of a silver penny, set
in a ring; it consisted of a hundred and twenty
separate parts, the whole of which weighed
together less than six pennyweights. And so
intricate were the works, that Arnold had to make
tools himself before he could make the watch.
The King was so delighted with the work that
he sent Arnold five hundred guineas. When
the Czar of Russia heard of this, he offered
Arnold a thousand guineas to make a similar one
for him; but this the artist refused, determined
that his own sovereign's watch should be unique.

No marvel that these compact little pieces of
mechanism should sometimes have been
regarded, soon after their introduction, as the
abodes of spirits of good or evil. Persons much
nearer home than Tongataboo have so regarded
them. Aubrey tells the following tale of an
alleged sorcerer in the time of James the First.
' One time being at Home Lacy, in Herefordshire,
he happened to leave his watch in the
chamber window. The maidens came in to make
the bed, and hearing a thing in a case cry ' tick,
tick, tick,' presently concluded that that was his
devill or familiar, and took it by the stringe
with the tongs, and threw it out of the windowe