Three united men will ruin a town. (Arabic.) The power of combination was never more excellently expressed.
He begins the quarrel who gives the second blow. (Spanish.) There are but few who possess the requisite degree of wise and kindly forbearance and magnanimous self-command implied in this saying. To strike again, or rather (as the blow is figurative) to retort an angry word, is natural to most men; to preserve a reproving silence, or administer a dignified rebuke, is in the power only of great characters, and not with them at all times. But it is quite possible, as we live in a very pugnacious world, that such forbearance should not be thrown away upon every one, or the small majority of the magnanimous would soon be beaten out of existence. The above proverb, we believe, is originally Spanish, and, coming from a people so proverbially revengeful, seems very extraordinary, and only to be accounted for as the result of an abstract thought of some lofty-minded hidalgo, speculating on friendship. Don Quixote might have said it.
A stitch in time saves nine. One of the most sensible and practical of all proverbs, as every body's experience can avouch. Yet, in defiance of all their own experience, how many people we often see who constantly neglect the stitch in time! They do not forget it, or overlook it; and when they do, if you point it out to them, they still neglect it.
Chi non sa niente, non dubita di niente; he who knows nothing, doubts of nothing. The converse is equally true. He who knows much, is careful how he doubts of any thing. This is peculiarly inculcated, at the present time, by the extraordinary discoveries and success of science.
From the Ladies' Companion.
A CHAPTER ON WATCHES.
We have no means of telling how long a period elapsed from that primal time when the "evening and the morning made the first day," ere man's ingenuity devised a means of calculating the passing by of those precious moments of which his duration is composed, in order to economize them to the purposes of life. Shadows by day and stars at night appear to have indexed the flight of time for the ancient Hebrews; though it is very evident that long before the sun-dial of Ahaz was made memorable by the Prophet Isaiah, the Chaldeans, accustomed to calculate eclipses, and other astronomical phenomena, must have been in possession of some much more accurate instrument for its computation.
Days, months, and years, are constantly referred to in the books of the Old Testament, but nothing is said of more minute divisions of time, save that of the day into the natural ones of morning, noon, eventide, and night, until Judea became tributary to Rome, when three of the Evangelists, in describing the crucifixion, and the supernatural darkness subsequent to that event, remark that it lasted from the sixth hour to the ninth; and it is on record, that the Clepsydra, or water-clock, (said by Vitrivius to have been invented by one Ctesibius of Alexandria, in the reign of Ptolemy Evergetes), was introduced at Rome by P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica, in the 595th year of the city, and consequently many years before the birth of Christ. This simple time-keeper was so constructed, that the water issued, drop by drop, through a hole in the vessel, and fell into another, in which a light floating body marked the height of the water as it rose, and by this means the time that had elapsed. These instruments, we are told, were set full of water in the courts of judicature, and by them the lawyers pleaded; in order, as Phavorinus tells us, to prevent babbling, and cause those who spoke to be brief in their speeches. Hour, or sand-glasses, are also said to have originated at Alexandria, and to have been introduced into domestic use amongst the Romans eight years afterwards, or 158 years before the Christian era.
The earliest attempt at measuring time in this country appears to have been on the part of Alfred the Great, by means of waxen tapers. The exact period when those direct ancestors of our subject, clocks, or, as they were primitively called, horologes, came into use, is one of those things over which time has cast so thick a veil, that not even the researches of the encyclopædists can penetrate it. By some, the invention of clocks with wheels is ascribed to Pacificus, archdeacon of Verona, as early as the ninth century. And though we read that clocks (without water) were set up in churches toward the end of the twelfth, the author of the "Divina Commedia" is the first writer on record, who distinctly applies the term horologium to a clock that struck the hours; and he was born 1265, and died 1321.