The hands on the dial of time had been put backtemporarily, let us hope and praya thousand years.

"This," says Dr. Knight, "was probably the first dial on record, and is one hundred and forty years before Thales, and nearly four hundred before Plato and Aristotle, and just a little previous to the lunar eclipses observed at Babylon, as recorded by Ptolemy....

After the most torturing suspense, the dial at length showed me that the two hours had elapsed, and I hastened to the cell.

Sun-dials in the Temple, 95.

I told this to Dr. Nowell, and asserting my humbler, though not less zealous exertions in the same cause, I suggested that whatever return we might receive, we should still have the consolation of being like Butler's steady and generous Royalist, 'True as the dial to the sun, Although it be not shone upon.'

It was set up, as the old books have it, in the year 1669, by order of Charles II.; and in addition to the parts represented in the cut, the inventer intended to place a water-dial at each corner, which he had nearly completed when the original Dial for want of a cover, as he quaintly observes, (which according to his Majestie's Gracious Order should have been set over it in the Winter) was much injured by the snow lying frozen upon it.

[108] Hazlitt has a pleasant essay on a garden Sun-dial, from which I take the following passage: Horas non numero nisi serenasis the motto of a sun dial near Venice.

It was a pretty device of the gardener, recorded by Marvell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, made a dial out of herbs and flowers.

We then read the difference of the divisions traversed to the left and right upon the luminous dial through the image of the reticule.

The single-needle instrument pointed out the letters on the dial around it by successive deflections in which it was arranged to move, step by step, at the will of the sending station.

The decisive change from this was made in 1853.As the result of my examination and enquiries into the subject of sympathetic clocks, I established 8 sympathetic clocks in the Royal Observatory, one of which outside the entrance gate had a large dial with Shepherd's name as Patentee.

The old man sat looking at Mary in silence for some moments; not a great space of time, perhaps, as marked by the shadow on the dial behind them, but to Mary that gaze was unpleasantly prolonged.

The old sun-dial beside the walk Takes heart for sunny day; But half-awake marks sleepy hours By light through spring-time haze.

On each side of the opening in the lawn stood a small artificial mound, and just in front of the house a sun-dial by which each day, when the weather was clear, he set his watch.

Prince Rupert, by his contributions to science, had a better right to be there; but Charles was not even grateful enough for the elevation to protect the precious Dial from rain and snow.

The introduction of the gnomon (time-pillar) and dial into Greece advanced astronomical knowledge, since they were used to determine the equinoxes and solstices, as well as parts of the day.