Five times by the taper’s light The hour-glass we have turned to-night. But the Hour-glass is a better measurer of time than is generally imagined. The flow of the sand from one bulb to another is perfectly equable, whatever may be the quantity of sand above the aperture. The stream flows no faster when the upper bulb is almost full than when it is almost empty; the lower heap not being influenced by the pressure of the heap above.[11] Bloomfield, in one of his rural tales, “The Widow to her Hour-glass,” sings: I’ve often watched thy streaming sand, And seen the growing mountain rise, And often found life’s hope to stand On props as weak in wisdom’s eyes: Its conic crown Still sliding down, Again heaped up, then down again: The sand above more hollow grew, Like days and years still filtering through, And mingling joy and pain. Ford, contemporary with Massinger, has this impressive picture of the primitive time-keeper: Minutes are number’d by the fall of sands, As, by an hour-glass, the span of time Doth waste us to our graves; and we look on it. An age of pleasures, revell’d out, comes home At last, and ends in sorrow: but the life, Weary of riot, numbers every sand, Wailing in sighs, until the last drop down; So to conclude calamity in rest: numbering wasted life. How cleverly the old dramatist, Shirley, illustrates this philosopher in glass: Let princes gather My dust into a glass, and learn to spend Their hour of state, that’s all they have; for when That’s out, Time never turns the glass again. The Hour-glass has almost entirely given place to the more useful, because to a greater extent self-acting, instrument; and it is now seldom seen except upon the table of the lecturer or private teacher, in the study of the philosopher, in the cottage of the peasant, or in the hand of the old emblematic figure of Time.[12] We still sometimes see it in the workshop of the cork-cutter. The half-minute glass is still employed on board ship; and the two and a half or three minute glass for boiling an egg with exactness.