The Instruments I doe not value or weigh one single penny. If I had been ambitious of praise, or had thought them (or better then they) worthy, at which to have taken my rise, out of my secure and quiet obscuritie, to mount up into glory, and the knowledge of men: I could have done it many yeares before. . . . . Long agoe, when I was a young student of the Mathematicall Sciences, I tryed many wayes and devices to fit my selve with some good Diall or Instrument portable for my pocket, to finde the houre, and try other conclusions by, and accordingly framed for that my purpose both Quadrants, and Rings, and Cylinders, and many other composures. Yet not to my full content and satisfaction; for either they performed but little, or els were patched up with a diversity of lines by an unnaturall and forced contexture. At last I . . . . found what I had before with much studie and paines in vaine sought for.[54] Mention has been made in the previous pages of two of his papers on sun-dials, prepared (as he says) when he was in his twenty-third year. The first was published in the Clavis of 1647. The second paper appeared in his Circles of Proportion. Both before and after the time of Oughtred much was written on sun-dials. Such instruments were set up against the walls of prominent buildings, much as the faces of clocks in our time. The inscriptions that were put upon sun-dials are often very clever: “I count only the hours of sunshine,” “Alas, how fleeting.” A sun-dial on the grounds of Merchiston Castle, in Edinburgh, where the inventor of logarithms, John Napier, lived for many years, bears the inscription, “Ere time be tint, tak tent of time” (Ere time be lost, take heed of time). Portable sun-dials were sometimes carried in pockets, as we carry watches. Thus Shakespeare, in As You Like It, Act II, sc. vii: “And then he drew a diall from his poke.” Watches were first made for carrying in the pocket about 1658. Because of this literary, scientific, and practical interest in methods of indicating time it is not surprising that Oughtred devoted himself to the mastery and the advancement of methods of time-measurement. Besides the accounts previously noted, there came from his pen: The Description and Use of the double Horizontall Dyall: Whereby not onely the hower of the day is shewne; but also the Meridian Line is found: And most Astronomical Questions, which may be done by the Globe, are resolved. Invented and written by W. O., London, 1636. The “Horizontall Dyall” and “Horologicall Ring” appeared again as appendixes to Oughtred’s translation from the French of a book on mathematical recreations.