The actual decision has been made upon no such grounds as these. It has been one of pure practical convenience, and has resulted from the amazing growth of Great Britain as a naval and commercial power. Like Tyre of old, she is 'situate at the entry of the sea, a merchant of the people for many isles,' and 'her merchants are the great men of the earth.' To tell in full, therefore, the steps by which the Greenwich meridian has overcome all others is practically to tell again, from a different standpoint, the story of the 'expansion of England.' The need for a supreme navy, the development of our empire beyond the seven seas, the vast increase of our carrying trade--these have made it necessary that Englishmen should be well supplied with maps and charts. The hydrographic and geographic surveys carried on, either officially by this country, or by Englishmen in their own private capacity, have been so numerous, complete, and far-reaching as not only to outweigh those of all other countries put together, but to induce the surveyors and explorers of not a few other countries to adopt in their work the same prime meridian as that which they found in the British charts of regions bordering on those which they were themselves studying. Naturally, the meridian of Greenwich has not only been adopted for Great Britain, but also for the British possessions over-sea, and, from these, for a large number of foreign countries; whilst our American cousins retain it, an historic relic of their former political connection with us. The victories of Clive at Arcot and Plassy, of Nelson at the Nile and Trafalgar, the voyages and surveys of Cook and Flinders, and many more; the explorations of Bruce, Park, Livingstone, Speke, Cameron, and Stanley; these are some of the agencies which have tended to fix 'Longitude Nought' in the Greenwich Transit Room. There are two somewhat different senses in which the meridian of Greenwich is the standard meridian for nearly the entire world. The first is the sense about which we have already been speaking; it constitutes the fundamental line whence distances east and west are measured, just as distances north and south are measured from the equator. But there is another, though related sense, in which it has become the standard. _It gives the time to the world._ There are few questions more frequently put than, 'What time is it?' 'Can you tell me the true time?' A stickler for exactitude might reply, 'What kind of time do you mean?' 'Do you mean solar or sidereal time?' 'Apparent time or mean time?' 'Local time or standard time?' There are all these six kinds of time, but it is only within the last two generations, within, indeed, the reign of our Sovereign, Queen Victoria, that the subject of the differences of most of these kinds of time has become of pressing importance to any but theorists.