On the basis of such evidence I have suggested elsewhere[9] that the clock is "nought but a fallen angel from the world of astronomy." The first great clocks of medieval Europe were designed as astronomical showpieces, full of complicated gearing and dials to show the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets, to exhibit eclipses, and to carry through the involved computations of the ecclesiastical calendar. As such they were comparable to the orreries of the 18th century and to modern planetariums; that they also showed the time and rang it on bells was almost incidental to their main function. One must not neglect, too, that it was in their glorification of the rationality of the cosmos that they had their greatest effect. Through milleniums of civilization, man's understanding of celestial phenomena had been the very pinnacle of his intellect, and then as now popular exhibition of this sort was just as necessary, as striking, and as impressive. One does not have to go far to see how the paraphernalia of these early great astronomical clocks had great influence on philosophers and theologians and on poets such as Dante. It is the thesis of this part of my argument that the ordinary time-telling clock is no affiliate of the other simple time-telling devices such as sundials, sand glasses and the elementary water clocks. Rather it should be considered as a degenerate branch from the main stem of mechanized astronomical devices (I shall call them protoclocks), a stem which can boast a continuous history filling the gap between the appearance of simple gearing and the complications of de Dondi. We shall return to the discussion of this main stem after analyzing the very recently discovered parallel stem from medieval China, which reproduced the same evolution of mechanized astronomical devices and incidental time telling. Of the greatest significance, this stem reveals the crucial independent invention of a mechanical escapement, a feature not found in the European stem in spite of centuries of intensive historical research and effort. THE CHINESE TRADITION