before it comes forth complete. Owing to this delicate and varied workmanship, materials originally not worth sixpence are frequently converted into watches worth a hundred pounds and more, so costly may their appendages be made. But in all these different branches of a business which maintains thousands of families, the only part of it which falls to women in this country is the polishing of the cases, which the casemakers' wives are sometimes employed to do. Perhaps no object of man's ingenuity has been made the exponent of so many grave morals as the _watch_. Poets and philosophers have managed that its beatings should be only a little less gloomy to the imagination than the associations of a passing bell; but Paley has thrown a glory round this gloom, and aggrandized it from a peevish reminder of passing time into a fair argument of a Creator's presence, in the delicate and wonderful machinery of nature, which could no more come by chance than could this little instrument have been formed without a contriver. What the author of the "Old Church Clock" has said of that branch of our subject, may be equally applied to this--"there is no dead thing so like a living one." Day by day, year by year, its iron heart throbs on, some of them surviving, as we have seen, for centuries, though they are said to beat 17,160 times in an hour. Well would it be for us if the time-keeper in our bosoms, beating momently the escape of our allotted term, acted as lightly on the frame; but all its emotions help to wear this out. In the dawn of its appearance, in an age when every science that set men wondering was in some degree regarded as the work of magic, what a sensation must these "animated eggs" have occasioned, and how suggestive! unless the fanciful belief of some of the early fathers of the church, who averred that gems and precious metals were first made known to mortals by fallen angels, who also inspired the desire to profit by, and be adorned with them, had any thing to do with the tabooing of evil by holy signatures--how suggestive are the quaint gravings of saints and scriptural subjects on the cover of the watch dug up at Winchester, of the antique custom of inscribing trinkets with sacred symbols, and so converting them into amulets; a custom which the Greeks and Romans borrowed from the Egyptians, and which the early Christians perpetuated after them. We have seen the watch, originally oval, take an octagon form; after which it subsided into its present shape, the only variation being in size, and degrees of roundness.