Thus far, in spite of occasional glimpses of the Middle Ages and of modern times, we have dealt, for the most part, with earlier ages. Now our story must leave these behind, and thus passes the ancient world with its strange pagan civilization which was so human, so wise and so simple. It is difficult for modern Americans even to imagine existence in ancient Greece or Rome or in still more ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia—since the whole attitude toward life was so essentially different from what it is to-day. Our debt to the ancients in this one matter of recording time is typical of that in many others. To them we owe our whole fundamental system and conception of it from the astronomy by which we measure our years and our seasons and make our appeal to the final standard of the stars, down to the arithmetic of our minutes and seconds and the very names of our months and days. [Illustration: Sun Dial Designed and Placed by Sir Isaac Newton in Cranbury Park, Winchester, England Pulpit Two-Hour Glass American, 1700-50 in the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass. Silver Gilt French Hour Glass Eighteenth Century in the Metropolitan Museum TYPES OF THE EARLIEST TIME TELLING DEVICES _The sun dial is the first ancestor of all time tellers, and the sand glass was probably the first portable time telling device._] In the modern application and practical use of all this, on the other hand, we owe them nothing. They never made a clock or watch, or any like device which has more than a merely ornamental use to-day. They gave us the general plan so well that we have never bettered it, but they left later generations to work out the details. They invented the second as a division of time but they did not measure by it. They did not care to try. For them, learning was the natural right and power of the few, and the gulf between the most that was known by the few and the little that was known in general, was like the gulf between great wealth and great poverty among ourselves. Indeed, in this age of teaching and preaching, when a thought seems to need only to be born in order to be spread abroad over the world, it is hard for us even to conceive the instinct by which men kept their learning like a secret among the initiated and felt no impulse to make known that which they knew. Their great men thought and did wonderful things which are now the common property of us all. And their common folk lived in a fashion astonishingly primitive by comparison, in an ignorance which certainly was weakness and may somehow have been bliss. That world of theirs is gone—the body and the spirit of it alike. And there remains to us, along with much of their art and their science, the hour-glass to symbolize that relentless flight of time which they feared but never tried to save; and the quaint sun-dial in our gardens, a memory of that worldly-wise old philosophy which counted only the shining hours. CHAPTER SIX _The Clocks Which Named Themselves_