four seasons of the year were equally and simultaneously distributed throughout the world--if, when we are going to our beds, the huntsmen were not up in Arabia, but lying amidst their camels beneath a tent in some far oasis of the wilderness. But these matters have been regulated by Divine Intelligence, and uniformity is no part of the scheme. In a very few years we shall have direct railway communication throughout Europe, from the west to the east--will it therefore be advisable to adopt a common standard of time--say that of Greenwich--for all the trains? Are the inhabitants of Paris to be aroused from slumber some three hours before their wont, because the early train from Moscow is to start at nine o'clock? If not, why is it sought to apply the same principle here? Perhaps our excellent councillors are not aware that there is no such thing as a universal time. There is no peculiar virtue in the Greenwich time, any more than in that which is noted at the observatory on the Calton Hill. We are afraid that a gross misconception upon this point prevails in the High Street, and that some of our friends have got hold of a legend, said to be current in the Canongate, that the city clocks were put back twelve minutes and a half by Charles Edward in the Forty-five--that they have given out false time for upwards of a century--and that the present is a patriotic and spirited move of the magistrates to restore the hours to their pristine order and arrangement. If any of our civic representatives have fallen into error on this account, and been led astray by the cunning fable, we beg to assure them that it rests upon no solid foundation. Our ancestors entertained an almost Persian veneration for the sun, and would not have suffered any such interference. The city clocks of Edinburgh were not set upon the authority of the famous watch discovered at Prestonpans, of which it stands recorded, that "she died the very night Vich Ian Vohr gave her to Murdoch."