In more recent days the making and fixing of the dial with its gnomon was carried out on fixed principles, and there is now no difficulty about such an installation provided that the same astronomical conditions are observed. (For rules governing dialling, see [Glossary].)
FIG. 83.—EARLY DIALS—ON THE LEFT AN ARMILLARY DIAL; IN THE CENTRE PILLAR DIAL; AND ON THE RIGHT A RING DIAL.
(In the British Museum.)
FIG. 84.—CURIOUS OLD MICROSCOPE, MADE IN 1780.
(In the Municipal Museum, Hull.)
Some Old Dials.
The pattern known as the garden dial is that commonly met with (for the large dials once fixed on church towers and in public places rarely come into the market); and the old dial plates seen in curio-shops have come from such pillars. Charles Dickens had a fine old sundial in his garden at Gad's Hill Place, and it has often been copied. The globe dial, set on suitable pillars, has been made frequently for modern antique gardens. An enterprising maker of dials purchased the beautiful balustrades of old Kew Bridge when it was removed a few years ago, and capping them with replicas of old dials—in some cases with genuine antiques—produced excellent examples of the old type of garden sundial. Similar dials, more imposing in size, are met with in curious and yet very suitable places by motorists, cyclists, and others when touring in the country. A charming Elizabethan relic is the stone bridge across the River Wye in the village of Wilton, near Ross. On the north wall of the parapet is a stone pillar surmounted by a sundial having four faces—an interesting landmark and often admired; and when the sun shines on it the traveller invariably pulls out his watch and compares it with the shadow of the gnomon. There were once many famous dials in situ in London; most of them are gone; there are some, however, readily seen, like the noted pillar dial in the Temple and that on the front of one of the old buildings in Lincoln's Inn.
Of other forms of dials, the eccentricities of the horologists they might be called, there are the "goblet" dials in the form of a cup, the hour-lines being engraved on the interior; pillar dials which are cylinders with movable gnomons; the quadrant, in the use of which the altitude of the sun is taken through pierced sights, the time being shown on curved hour-lines by means of a plumb-line hanging from the angle; and the ring dials, which were very popular in England down to the year 1800. In Fig. 83 are shown earlier dials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the left there is an armillary dial by F. Culpeper, of London. In the middle there is a pillar dial dated 1567, and on the right of the figure a ring dial made by Humphrey Cole in 1575, all three important types. Perhaps one of the chief delights of the study of sundial plates is to read and make out the different mottoes and legends on them—most of them relating to the flight of time, some alluding to man's duties which, when neglected, can never be made up, for "Time and tide wait for no man."