Professor ABBE, Delegate of the United States. I would like to ask whether this amendment adds anything substantially to the resolution. I think it does not. It simply specifies the details of the resolution pending before us. That resolution "proposes the adoption of a universal day for all purposes for which it may be found convenient." That is general. The amendment merely specifies certain of these purposes. That is a matter of detail. Mr. ALLEN, Delegate of the United States. Mr. President, I desire to offer an amendment to the amendment, as follows: "Civil or local time is to be understood as the mean time of the approximately central meridian of a section of the earth's surface, in which a single standard of time may be conveniently used." Mr. RUTHERFURD, Delegate of the United States. Mr. President, it does not seem to me that it is within the competence of this Conference to define what is local time. That is a thing beyond us. Mr. W. F. ALLEN, Delegate of the United States, then said: Mr. President and gentlemen, all efforts to arrive at uniformity in scientific or every-day usage originate in a desire to attain greater convenience in practice. The multiplicity of coins of which the relative value can only be expressed by fractions, the various common standards of weights and of measures, are inconvenient both to the business man and the scientist. Alike inconvenient to both are the diverse standards of time by which the cities of the world are governed, differing, as they do, by all possible fractions of hours. All coins have a relative and interchangeable value based upon their weight and fineness. Weights and measures remain the same by whatever unit they may be expressed; but, primarily, time can only be measured by a standard actually or apparently in motion. Absolutely accurate mean local time, varying, as it does, by infinitesimal differences at every point in the circuit of the earth, may be shown on a stationary object, but cannot in general be kept by an individual or object in motion. The mean local time of some fixed point in each locality must be taken as the standard for practical use. The important question to be determined is, over what extent of territory, measuring east and west from such fixed point, its mean time may be employed for all ordinary purposes without inconvenience. This can be absolutely determined only by practical experience. Careful study of this phase of this subject led, perhaps, more directly than any one single cause, to the proposal of the detailed system of standard time which now satisfactorily controls the operations of one hundred and twenty thousand miles of railway in the United States and Canada, and governs the movements of fifty millions of people.