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Following a path that led away from the wall, he came upon a fountain without any water, in a cracked basin dry as a lizard-haunted wall, a sundial without a gnomon, leaning wearily away from the sun, a marble statue without a nose, and streaked about with green: like an army of desolation in single file, they revealed to Cosmo the age-long neglect of the place.
In this I shall set forth the rules for dialling, showing how they are found through the shadows cast by the gnomon from the sun's rays in the firmament, and on what principles these shadows lengthen and shorten.
From the use of the gnomon there naturally grew up the conception of angular measurements; and with the advance of geometrical conceptions there came the hemisphere of Berosus, the equinoctial armil, the solstitial armil, and the quadrant of Ptolemy all of them employing shadows as indices of the sun's position, but in combination with angular divisions.
I think the only remark made by either of us was when Bhima Gandharva declared in a voice of much earnestness, from behind a broken gnomon where he had ensconced himself, that he saw Time lying yonder on his back, with his head on a broken dial, nearly asleep.
"A rude sundial, without a gnomon, is almost obliterated from the wall of the cloisters, but its motto, 'Dies nostri quasi umbra super terram et nulli est mora', still resists the effects of decay, as if to serve the appropriate purpose of the convent's epitaph. At the foot of the long stairs in the great hall is the ruined chapel, its altar broken up and despoiled of its pictures and ornaments.
Up to the time of his leaving England he was constantly using Olshausen's Commentary on the New Testament, a book he was as thoroughly versed in as Archbishop Trench himself. I think that he consulted no other books in his study of the Gospels, but Olshausen and Bengel's Gnomon. 'In our pleasures at Dresden there was a mixture of the utile with the dulce.
It would also be a pleasant task to investigate the properties of the gnomon of the Chinese, Egyptians, and Peruvians, the scarphie of Eratosthenes, the astrolabe of Hipparchus, the parallactic rules of Ptolemy, Regimontanus Purbach, and Walther, the sextants and quadrants of Tycho Brahe, and the modifications of these various instruments, the invention and use of which, from century to century, bringing us at last to the telescopic age, or the days of Lippershay, Jannsen, and Galileo.
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