watch-makers scarcely knew how to apply a jewel, or otherwise they would have inserted the pivot in a proper manner. The story is anyhow a very extraordinary one, for, supposing the Clockmakers' Company to be innocent of conspiracy on the subject, it must have been a miraculously curious whim which possessed old Huggeford to insert a jewel as an ornament in a place where it would not be seen, and still more wonderful that it should, sham as it was, be placed exactly where it should suit the purpose of after-litigation. Of course there can be no imputation arising out of this incident to affect the members of the Clockmakers' Company of the present time, for they are no more answerable for what was done above a century and a half ago than the Parliament of to-day is to be blamed for allowing the execution of Charles I., or for enacting the laws which led to the loss of our American colonies. After the invention of jewels for watches came a still more important discovery. Since 1530, when Gemma Frisius first proposed to ascertain the relative longitude of any place or ship at sea, by means of an horological machine for indicating the time of the first meridian, the subject had excited the attention of most of our philosophers, but unavailingly, as there was then no chronometrical instrument, upon which reliance might safely be placed. Huygens, in 1664, had contrived a time-piece actuated by a spring and regulated by a pendulum, but the pendulum was affected by the tossing of the ship, and by a change of temperature, as well as being subject, as was afterwards discovered, to a variation in weight depending on the parallel of latitude. The Academy of Sciences at Paris proposed, in 1720, a reward for the best paper in reply to the question:--'What is the most perfect method of preserving on the sea the equable motion of a pendulum?' The reward was given to a Dutchman named Massy, but his plan was not carried out. An English watch-maker named Henry Sully happened to be about this time in Paris directing a large manufactory of chronometers, and he presented the French Academy with a marine time-keeper of superior construction to the time-pieces of that period, and accompanied his gift by a memoir describing it. Whilst still engaged in the study of his art, Sully, who was a clever man, unfortunately died, and the opportunity of advance seemed to have passed away.