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Updated: May 20, 2025
Outwardly there was a splendid civilization as is shown by the monuments. There were great cities with splendid palaces, temples and libraries. "There were workers in fabrics, metals, stones, implements and ornaments." Time was divided as now and sun-dials showed the time of day. Great systems of canals existed and the country was in a high state of cultivation.
It shows what can be done by sun-dials and structures almost level with the ground to mark the movements of the heavenly bodies, and thus demonstrates that primitive stargazers might even thus early acquire a very considerable knowledge of astronomy.
All agreeable thoughts float in his mind during his summer nooning doze when he lies on the grass after dinner waiting for the sun to strike the west side of the farmhouse chimneys, which, standing square north and south, serve for sun-dials.
Or we cultivated a turn for mechanic or scientific operations; making little sun-dials of paper; or weaving those ingenious parentheses, called cat-cradles; or making dry peas to dance upon the end of a tin pipe; or studying the art military over that laudable game "French and English," and a hundred other such devices to pass away the time mixing the useful with the agreeable as would have made the souls of Rousseau and John Locke chuckle to have seen us.
The weaving of tapestry, oil painting, the art of painting on glass, even pocketwatches and sun-dials were, as Guicciardini asserts, originally invented in the Netherlands. To them we are indebted for the improvement of the compass, the points of which are still known by Flemish names.
They carved their Lares and Penates on their house-fronts very curiously, with sun-dials and hatchments, sacred texts and legends of hospitality. The narrow streets of Ghent, Louvain, Liege, Mechlin, Antwerp, Ypres, Bruges are thus full of household memories and saintly traditions.
We find, by Sewall's time, that the houses of well-to-do folk all had "quarrels of glass" set in windows. The flight of time in New England houses was marked without doors by sun-dials; within, by noon-marks, hour-glasses, and rarely by clepsydras, or water-clocks. The first mention, in New England records, of a clock is in Lechford's note-book.
His doctrine was, that men were born of earth united with water, and vivified by the beams of the sun; his crime seems to have been, that he made the first geographical maps and sun-dials; declared the earth moveable and of a cylindrical form. Secondly. The Atomists, or the disciples of Democritus, who attribute every thing, to the concurrence of atoms.
No one among us exacts a description of a spire. The phallus was as common to them, commoner even. It was on the coins, on the doors, in the gardens. As a preservative against Envy it hung from children's necks. On sun-dials and water clocks it marked the flight of time. The vestals worshipped it. At weddings it was used in a manner which need not be described.
Without meaning it, I feel I am a spy on the on-goings of the quiet place. Around my house there is an old-fashioned rambling garden, with close-shaven grassy plots, and fantastically clipped yews which have gathered their darkness from a hundred summers and winters; and sun-dials in which the sun is constantly telling his age; and statues green with neglect and the stains of the weather.
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