beasts, traced in bright tints and fairy outlines on the smooth expanse divided into squares and oblongs by slender pilasters or columns rich with delicate ornamentation. We must make one charge against these ancient artists, however, that of immorality. The designs in more than one saloon and bedchamber are such as would have offended any taste not depraved, and shocked any feelings not rendered coarse by licentiousness. Indeed, these paintings, as well as the designs on many of the articles of furniture and embellishment, along with other silent witnesses called forth from the tomb, give sad evidence against these luxurious old Campanian sinners. Pompeii shared the doom of Sodom and Gomorrah, and it seems to have deserved its fate as richly as they did, for it must have been a pollution on the face of the fair earth. Yet here art, and literature, and science bore their richest fruits. What do the philosophers who believe in an æsthetic and intellectual regeneration of mankind say to this? How do they account for the combination of the greatest refinement, the most educated intelligence, and the highest art, with the grossest profligacy and the loosest vice? I fancy it would be difficult to solve this problem, unless we are content to acknowledge that there is something in man deeper and higher than can be influenced by art or literature, or by these stirred and quickened to the full; and that art and literature will never introduce the millenium, will never "ring in the thousand years of peace," unless the secret soul, the spirit of love and immortality can be brought into some harmony, however faint, with the Almighty and Omnipresent Spirit; unless it can be brought to put its faith in something grander than man, more stable and beautiful than the fair Cosmos, and to feel itself to be allied thereto, itself inherently eternal and divine. Poor, ruined, melancholy Pompeii! about the saddest place human eyes can rest on! There, on the solid cubes that pave the streets, are the ruts worn by swift chariot-wheels two thousand years ago; how many a gallant youth sped along here with prancing coursers! and here are the baths; how often did the loungers make these old sad roofs echo with laughter as carelessly they chatted below! and here is the banqueting room; there the wine-coolers; beyond, the silent fountain; to the left, what cosy chambers; how often was love's tale not in vain whispered yonder; how often did the purple night look in on the sleep of beauty; how often has the sailing moon silvered those lonely columns, played on the leaping fountain, and softly lighted up the sweet scented flowers in the stately vases! Alas! and all is now the most desolate of desolations; shown by a callous cicerone to the wandering foreigner, as the strangest spectacle in Campania. It must have been a most stately and fair little city ere that fatal shower of ashes. The streets, though narrow, as Italian streets are to this day, were well paved, and lined with elegant houses; the ground floor was in many cases let as a shop and tastefully decorated; all through the town the fountained gardens in the pillared courts threw their fragrance on the wind. Many of the houses were painted on the exterior, or had their lower story inlaid with variously colored marbles. The streets had triumphal arches ; frequent rose the symmetrical temples of the gods, among which the mystic Iris claimed the most costly shrine; here stood the Doric colonnade of the Forum; there the Pantheon; further off rose the tiers of the Amphitheater, besides which there were two theaters for the amusement of these pleasure-loving children of the sunshine. Then, as now, the warm sun and clear sky tempted the inhabitants to be constantly out of doors; the thoroughfares were thronged with vivacious, restless, gaily-costumed crowds. The Sarnus then was " a shining river" rushing to the halcyon seat that filled the port, and came to murmur and ripple close to the city walls; now the river is a shrunken stream, and the blue sea has drawn back affrighted, and the city is a skeleton. As we drove homeward we were struck by an instance of that immobility of custom which in Italy, more than in any other country, is so remarkable, because there perhaps better than anywhere else we can compare the habits of the present with those of a remote past. On the walls of the Pompeian wine-shops is the sign of two men carrying an amphora,“ bearing it between them on a staff," as the Hebrew spies bore the cluster of grapes from the banks of Eshcol; and in a field by the roadside we saw, as we drove along, two peasants carrying in exactly the same In the early history of the race man measured time by watching the sun by day and the moon by night, using his hands and fingers to measure off and space the great arch of the heavens. He next graduated the march of a shadow and the noon mark by the sill of the window and the threshold of the doorway. The sun-dial in garden and courtyard was devised and the manner a vessel of the same shape as the amphora, which we had found painted in the wine-shops. The use of the birch, recommended by Solomon, and now condemned by some philanthropists, was in vogue in Pompeii. A house is believed to have been that of a schoolmaster, because its exterior is embellished with the representation of an unhappy urchin hoisted on another's back, and getting a good drub-hour-glass of sand or of water, for use when bing, administered on the exposed portion of his person by a man standing in a commanding position in his rear. The evening was beautiful and serene, as we sped along behind two swift horses to Naples. Gently rolled the blue wavelets of the bay; whitely gleamed the far-stretching line of city; dim in the soft evening haze rose in the distance the islands, and the further headlands in front; and as the sun sank, we turned round and saw his rosy radiance creep slowly up the eastern hills, till at last it wavered off them, then lingering for a little on Vesuvius' banner of smoke, it vanished altogether, and grey twilight stole down to mantle the scene in mild and dewy darkness. TIME AND TIME-KEEPING. NOTHING so baffles and bewilders the mind, and eludes the grasp of the subtlest human intellect, as the idea of time, of which electricity and space may be called the younger brothers. Within this wonderful illimitable idea are circled all the mysteries, changes, motions, and developments of the material universe. sun did not shine. Clepsydræ, a kind of the portable tide, were used in China, Chaldea, India, and Egypt, and were introduced by Plato from Egypt into Greece. Cæsar found them in Britain, and it was by them that he observed that the nights there were shorter than those in Italy. It is said that Ctesibus of Alexandria added wheels, making it in fact a water clock, at least one hundred and forty-five years before Christ. Clepsydræ, with toothed wheels, are now to be seen sculptured on Trajan's Column at Rome. Anaximander of Miletus is said to have invented sun-dials at Lacedæmon in the time of Cyrus the Great, about six hundred years before Christ. The first sun-dial is said to have been set up at Rome by L. Papirius Cursor B. C. 301; and a second by the consul M. Valerius Mesela, who brought it from Catana, in Sicily, during the first Punic war, thirty-six years later. At this time the Romans were not aware that a dial for Sicily was not calculated for Rome. Scipio Nasica, B. C. 153, first measured time at Rome by falling water, which served by night as well as by day. It is generally admitted that the clock was invented by the Saracens, but the earliest clock of which we have any specific account, was made by Gerbert, afterward Pope Sylvester II., at Magdeburg, A. D. 990, if we except the horologia of Pacificus, archdeacon of Verona, made about the year 850, which is claimed by some to have been a clock with weights. The account of Gerbert's horologia, or clock, The importance of this discovery was is more satisfactory. "It was so wontoo great for any single period, or any sin-derful and surprising as to go by means gle mind; and it was not till after thousands of years had passed away, and Christianity had descended upon the nations, that a true standard of time was fixed and man succeeded in providing himself with machines substantially isochronous with the sun, by which he could record with unerring certainty the flying moments. To fix a standard of time, and to devise mechanical agents capable of giving an unerring record of the hurrying moments required the highest exercise of man's inventive and reasoning faculties, and forms one of the noblest of his material triumphs, the importance of which is becoming daily more and more apparent, as one after another of the tremendous and subtle forces of nature are revealed to his control. of weights and wheels." It is generally supposed that clockmaking was introduced into Germany about this time; but where or by whom the clock with toothed wheels, crown wheel escapement, and the regulator in the form of a cross, suspended by a cord, with two weights to shift on it when reg WATCH MANUFACTORY OF APPLETON, TRACY, AND CO., WALTHAM, MASS. ulating it, was invented, can now only be guessed at. It was this kind of clock which Charles V., king of France, caused to be made at Paris by Henry Vick, who was sent from Germany for the express purpose, about the year 1370. It is known as Vick's clock. equal portions, was thus early developed, it was not until eight hundred years later, near the end of the fifteenth century, that they came into use in private families. The church tower clock was reduced to pocket size, with a coil spring, as a moving power, before the application of the pendulum to the clock or the balance spring to the watch, two great improvements in horological mechanism, made simultaneously about two hundred years ago. It is claimed that Gallileo discov Richard Wallingford, abbot of St. Albans, in 1426, constructed a clock which showed the course of the sun, moon, and stars, and the rise and fall of the tides. In 1382 the duke of Burgundy took from the city of Courtray, which, he had cap-ered the isochronism of the pendulum, that tured, a clock which struck the hours, and had it set up in the tower of Notre Dame, at Dijon, where it still remains. These are the three most ancient clocks, after that of Gerbert, of which we have any certain information. Thus it will be seen that if the Romish clergy did not invent the art of clock-making, they certainly did everything in their power to promote and encourage it. Time-measuring being so desirable for the regulation of the stated services required by the Church, which took place at all hours of the day and night, their attention was naturally called to a subject in which they were so much interested. The balance in these early clocks was substantially the same as that used in the watches of the present day. But though the great mechanical principle of the timekeeper, the division of a constant force into VOL. XIII.-37 is, that pendulums oscillate through different arcs in the same time. There are several claimants for the invention of pendulum clocks; but there is no doubt that Huygens discovered that the curve in which a body must move, so as to oscillate through large and small arcs in the same time, is not a circle, but a cycloid, which is the true theory of the pendulum. The only mechanical difference between a watch and a clock is that a watch will go in any position, but a clock only in one. The hair-spring in a watch, like the pendulum in a clock, with a proper escapement, makes the vibrations the same in time, irrespective of the amount of force exerted by the main-spring. With these improvements clocks and watches would be nearly perfect, were it not for the disturbing effects of temperature, which makes them thermometers as well as chronometers. There are two ways of correcting this disturbance: the one is to have a piece of metal so placed that its expansion will shorten and thus strengthen the hair spring; the other is to make the balance of two metals of different degrees of expansibility, so arranged that the average mass of the balance is brought nearer the center of motion by expansion. It was this compensation applied by Harrison which won him the reward of £20,000 offered by the British Board of Longitude for an instrument which should ascertain the longitude at sea, within a given limit. For sea-going chronometers, and timepieces which are exposed to great changes of temperature, this compensation is all important. But for ordinary purposes it is of much less consequence than the correct poising of the balance, so that its time will be the same in all positions; and the jeweling of the holes and accurate fitting of the pivots, which makes the watch reliable and complete. It is in these particulars that the highest accuracy and skill of human workmanship is required. The art of piercing holes in rubies, or any hard precious stone, was discovered by M. Facio, of Geneva, in 1700, when he came to Paris with this art as a secret, and soon after repaired to London, where at that time the art of watchmaking was cultivated more than at Paris. The watch being a thing so personal and indispensable, it was a matter of course that every civilized country would have its watches and watch-making, and thus millions of watches have been made of every quality and price. Yet there has been no connected and uniform system of manufacture, but every watch has had a distinct individuality, no two, even of the same maker, being alike, only the very best works of the very best finishers ever approaching perfection. All European watches are made by handicraft, and the rough parts in different workshops, so that, from necessity, a large majority of imported watches are the production of inferior skill and can never be reliable. England and Switzerland have supplied the world with time-pieces, and we have imported watches, and parts of watches, to the amount of more than $50, 000,000, since the close of the last war with England. Our importations for the last few years have been about $5,000,000 per annum. Isolated attempts to manufacture watches in this country have failed, rather from competition and lack of capital than from want of skill. Within a short time an enterprise has been inaugurated which seems destined to triumph and become a great national institution, affecting favorably the immense watch trade of the world. We speak of the manufactory of the American Watch Company, to which a brief reference was made in the last number of the NATIONAL. This unique establishment is located on the banks of Charles River, a little above the village of Waltham, in the State of Massachusetts. The building is two stories in height, and urrounds a quadrangular court, which gives abundant light and air. The different departments are furnished with numerous delicate machines, operated by steam power, by which every part of the watch is made to a pattern or guage, with a precision that no skill of handicraft can rival. With the exception of the jewels and pivots, every watch is in every part exactly like every other watch of the same style. The sizes of the several pivots and jewels in each watch are recorded under its number, so that should either fail anywhere they can be readily replaced. The escapements, which in European watches have each its own individuality, are uniform in the American. In the Waltham watches nothing is left to the eye or touch of the workman; on every part the machine impresses its own accuracy. The manufacturers have adopted the simplest form of the lever watch as their staple, designed to supply the place of the millions of unreliable and worthless European watches with which our country is flooded. The most elaborate finish in all respects has been achieved; but it is not the design of the manufacturers to enter into a showy and useless competition with the highest priced watches, on the score of external finish, believing that the more desirable qualities of reliability, durability, cheapness, and simple elegance, will be best appreciated, and more valuable to the purchaser than any elaborateness of finish, which too often conceals fatal internal defects in the watch as a time-keeper. American movements without cases are made at about one half the cost of European movements of a similar grade, with the immense advantage of being uniformly reliable. TOP PLATE. The accompained illustrations were photographed and engraved from one of the full jeweled Waltham movements, and give a perfect idea of the appearance of the works when set up ready for casing. in which form they leave the manufactory. The works are exceedingly simple and substantial, having but about one hundred parts, while the English lever movements have about eight hundred, the chain alone being composed of more than six hundred, while it is absolutely of no use, and its retention is one of the marvels of John Bull's obstinacy and conservatism. The manufacture of enameled dials, a most difficult and delicate art, has been successfully introduced into this establishment, and superior dials, of every style and color, are made by thousands for use on American and European watches. Silver and gold cases are also manufactured in every style; and the whole establishment affords another gratifying illustration of the capacity and ingenuity of our countrymen, which has enabled them to triumph in so many departments of manufacture, in the face of an active foreign competition. THE POWER OF THE DEAD. Say not their power is o'er, Although their lips be mute, their limbs be still; With might, unknown before, Those silent forms the living heart may thrill. Who stands beside the bed, Where rests the icy corpse within its shroud, Nor feels a secret dread, With which his soul ne'er to the living bow'd? The lowliest son of earth, The veriest babe that death hath smitten down, To those who gaze upon them all unknown. From their sad eyes that weep beside their bier, To their imprison'd souls made plain and clear. Confirm his word divine, That all have sinn'd, and death hath pass'd on all. The harvest of the Lord shall fill the earth, An Where'er some lonely mound Tells of the spot where mortal relics rest, At once that spot of ground Our hearts with unseen holiness invest, Say not they have no power! Perhaps they were our enemies in life, But now hath come an hour, When endeth all the tumult and the strife. Another mightier hand Hath still'd the opposer-anger now may cease; And for the loved and lost, move; When wildly tempest-tost, They to the soul as guiding stars may prove. And many a gentle word Of precious counsel, all too long despised, Now to be thought upon, and weigh'd and prized. And when the wayward heart Doubts how it shall some dark temptation shun; They may decide its part "So will we do, for so would they have done." Say not they are no more, Those who the heart with reverence thus can fill! Say not their power is o'er When thus its traces are around us still! |