Cunningham’s _Handbook_, 2d edit. p. 386. If this inscription be correct, it negatives the claim of Huyghens to having first applied the pendulum to the clock, about 1657; although Justus Bergen, mechanician to the Emperor Rodolphus, who reigned from 1576 to 1612, is said to have attached one to a clock used by Tycho Brahe. Inigo Jones, the architect of St. Paul’s, having been in Italy during the time of Galileo, it is probable that he communicated what he heard of the pendulum to Harris. Huyghens, however, violently contested for the priority; while others claimed it for the younger Galileo, who, they asserted, had, at his father’s suggestion, applied the pendulum to a clock in Venice which was finished in 1649.—Adam Thomson’s _Time and Timekeepers_, pp. 67, 68. Footnote 15: Nares’s _Glossary_. Footnote 16: _Denison on Clocks._ Footnote 17: _Adam Thomson._ Footnote 18: There is an odd traditionary story told of a Watch at Somerset House. A little above the entrance-door to the Stamps and Taxes is a white watch-face,—of which it is told, that when the wall was being built, a workman had the misfortune to fall from the scaffolding, and was only saved from destruction by the ribbon of his watch, which caught in a piece of projecting work. In thankful remembrance of his wonderful preservation, he is said to have inserted his watch into the face of the wall. Such is the popular belief, and hundreds of persons go to Somerset House to see this fancied memento, and hear the above tale. But the watch-face was placed in its present position many years ago by the Royal Society, as a meridian mark for a portable transit instrument in one of the windows of the anteroom. Captain Smyth assisted in mounting the instrument, and perfectly recollects the watch-face placed against the opposite wall. Footnote 19: _The Relations of Science_, by J. M. Ashley. Footnote 20: _Letter to James Mather, Esq., South Shields._ See also _Professor Airy’s Lecture_, 1854. Baily approximately weighed the earth by another contrivance, described and illustrated in _Things not generally Known_, First Series, which see. ---------------------------- EARLY RISING. Get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see The dew-bespangling herb and tree; Each flower has wept and bowed towards th’ east Above an hour since, yet you are not drest; Nay, not so much as out of bed, When all the birds have matins said, And sung their thankful hymns.—_Herrick._