However, the final improvement of the dial was made when it was discovered that by slanting the pointer, or gnomon, exactly toward the north pole of the sky—the point where the north star appears at night—the sun's shadow could be cast upon a flat surface with accurate results in indicating time. This may sound simple, but if you will look at a sun-dial such as may still be found in gardens, you will see that the lines of the hours and minutes are laid out on certain carefully calculated angles; you will realize that people had to acquire considerable knowledge before they were capable of making such calculations. The whole subject of dial-making is so complicated that, in 1612, there was published a big book of eight hundred pages on the subject. The angles of the lines of the sun-dial must be different for different latitudes. It took that strong-arm race of ancient times, the Romans, a hundred years to learn this fact. The Romans, at this time, were developing their civilization from the shoulders downward, while the Greeks and some of the Greek colonies developed theirs from the shoulders upward. Rome was a burly power, with powerful military muscles. Whatever it wanted it went out and took at the point of the sword, as some nations have endeavored to do in latter days. Thus, the city of Rome became a vast storehouse of miscellaneous loot—the fruit of other men's brains and hands. Some conqueror of that day took back with him a sun-dial from the Greek colony of Sicily. This was set up in Rome, where nobody realized that even the power of Rome's armies was not able to transplant the angle of the sun as it shone upon Sicily far to the southward. It was nearly one hundred years before these self-satisfied robbers found that they had been getting the wrong time-record from the stolen instrument. Thus, the original owners had a form of belated revenge, could they but have known it. One of the largest of all the sun-dials was the one set up by the Roman Emperor Augustus when he returned from his Egyptian wars bringing with him an obelisk not unlike the one which now stands near the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park, New York City. If you can imagine this Egyptian obelisk, with its strange hieroglyphic characters upon its four sides, surrounded by a great dial with the figures of the hours marked upon its surface, you will get an idea of the size of this huge timepiece. However, it was probably more picturesque than valuable as a time-keeper.