[Illustration: Figure 7.--TITLE PAGE of Father Borghesi's first book. The translation in its entirety is: "The Most Recent, Perpetual, Astronomical Calendar Clock: Theoretical--Practical: by means of which besides the hours, the minutes and seconds; the current year, the month; the day of the month and the day of the week; the dominical letter, epact, and thence, the day of all the feastdays, both fixed and movable; the solar cycle; the golden number; the Roman indiction; the dominant planet of any year and its sign; the phases of the moon and its mean age: and all the motions of the sun and the moon as to longitude, latitude, eccentricity, etc., are immediately seen, so accurately that [not only] the true new full moons and the true quadrature, etc., of the sun and moon appear, but also, all solar and lunar eclipses--both visible and invisible; as in heaven, so on the clock, they are conspicuously celebrated in their true times, and those of the past and those of the future, with their circumstances of time and duration, magnitude, etc., can be quickly determined. All this was devised and brought to light by the author, Francesco Borghesi of Anauni, a secular priest of Trent, A.A.L.L. & Doctor of Philosophy. (Trent: From the printshop of Giovanni Battista Monauni, With Permission of Superiors.)" (_Title page reproduced by permission of the Biblioteca della Citta di Trento._)] Again and again, Bertolla threw up his hands in despair and begged Father Borghesi to abandon the enterprise. He protested that he was not capable of producing such a complicated mechanism; he had neither the tools nor the skill. The priest wished to produce a clock such as the world had never seen before, such as the greatest scientists and clockmakers of all time had never been able to make. But Bertolla felt that he was only a provincial craftsman who could not hope to surpass them all with only his simple tools and training. In his book on the first clock, _Novissima Ac Perpetua Astronomica..._, Father Borghesi wrote that when he had finally come within a few weeks of the embryo stage in the development of his clock, he was faced with the problem of bolstering the sagging enthusiasm of Bertolla. The clockmaker's original enthusiasm had shown promise of great results, but as the days passed and the problems of the multiplex and generally unfamiliar apparatus to be forged for the workings of the automaton became more complex, his ardor decreased. Finally, Bertolla became so discouraged by the scoffers and frustrated by the fact that the work was insufficiently organized that Father Borghesi wrote that "it almost became a harder task for me to bolster up by daily opportunity and importunity the failing patience of the artisan, frightened away from the work already begun, than it was for me to extract from the inner recesses of mathematics and astronomy, without light and without a guide, the whole fabric of the machine itself!"