STYLE—The finger or gnomon on a sun-dial whose shadow, falling on the plate, indicates the time. SULLY, HENRY—An English watchmaker of the early eighteenth century who lived most of his life in France. He presented the French Academy with a marine timekeeper superior to the timepieces of the period, and a memoir describing it. He died shortly afterward and advance in the art was delayed. SUN-DIAL—A device for telling time by the shadow of a style, cast by the sun, as thrown upon a disk or plate marked with the hour lines. Dials were named from their positions—equinoctial or equatorial; east; erect or vertical; horizontal; inclining, etc., or from their purpose or method of use, as portable, reflecting, etc., or as in the case of the ring-dial, from their form. The word is derived from the Latin _dies_. The style in the earliest dials was a vertical staff, but later it was found that reasonable accuracy could only be obtained by a style set parallel to the earth's axis—that is, inclined to the horizontal at the angle of latitude of the locality in which the dial was set. Even before the first astronomical discoveries of the Babylonians, people had felt some need of a convenient device to mark and measure the passing of the time, especially the shorter divisions of recurring time, the time of day. Sunrise and sunset marked themselves by the horizon, but noon was harder to determine, and the points of mid-morning and mid-afternoon harder still. And with the knowledge of those regular movements in the heavens which determine time on earth, and with the closer division of the day into its hours, that need became a sheer necessity.