Contrivances for the measurement of time are of such antiquity that the first such implement is wrapped in the mysteries of a forgotten past. Before any mechanical form had been invented by which the rate of motion of a staff or pointer was made to indicate the lapse of time, the shadow of the sun in his apparent daily progress was used to mark the passing hours. A gnomon or pin erected so as to throw its traveling shadow across a graduated arc constitutes a dial. This was the earliest form.
The subject of sun-dials has been most exhaustively treated by Mrs. Gatty in her "Book of Sun-Dials", and later in our own country by Mrs. Earle. In England and Scotland many dials may still be found standing in old-fashioned gardens where they have marked the flight of time for hundreds of years. Many more dials, vertical ones, are to be found on the walls of public buildings, sometimes on churches, and on country houses as well. Not only stationary dials, but portable ones also, of silver and gold, were made and were long in use. Some of these are to be seen in various museums over the country, but most of them seem to have disappeared. George Washington owned a portable dial, and had a stationary one placed near his front door at Mt. Vernon.
In some of the famous old gardens of the South that still survive, echoes of their former glory, the sun-dial yet holds its accustomed place. In the very heart of New York city there is to-day a sun-dial; not one person in a hundred that passes knows that it is there, nor would scarcely one person in fifty know what it was. It stands on the lawn of Grace Church rectory, on Broadway, near Tenth Street. This spot of green in a wilderness of brick and stone refreshes the eye of many a hurrying pedestrian, and the dial marks the flight of the hours as sharply as if it stood in a country wilderness, amid birds and flowers.
The sun-dial was an important part of every great garden in early times. One was set up at Whitehall, England, in the sixteenth century.
"In a garden joining to this palace there is a Jet d'eau, with a sun-dial, which, while strangers looking at, a quantity of water forced by a wheel, which the gardiner turns at a distance, through a number of little pipes, plentifully sprinkles those that are standing around."
William Lawson, writing in 1618 a book on "A New Orchard and Garden", gives the directions about laying it out.
"And in some corner (or more) a true Dyall or clock, and some Anticke works, and especially silver sounding Musique, mixt instruments and voyces, gracing all the rest; How will you be rapt with delight?"
In 1821 William Cobbett wrote his "Rural Rides". In one of them he discourses of a visit to Moor Park, once the seat of Sir William Temple, whose heart, enclosed in a silver box, was said to have been buried in 1698 beneath his sun-dial. But Cobbett casts a doubt upon this time-honored legend by declaring that it was beneath a garden seat that the silver box was buried. Charles Lamb, in his essay "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple", discourses lovingly of the sun-dial. "It spoke of moderate labours, of pleasures not protracted after sunset, of temperance, and good hours." The dials made out of herbs and flowers come in for a special share of his commendation. How much more the dial induces meditation than the clock, but how very much lost we should be, these bustling times, if we had to depend upon one of these delightful but irresponsible "antiques" which say to you quite distinctly, "I mark only sunny hours."
