SUMMER TIME SCHEME.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 141, 16 June 1926, Page 16

SUMMER TIME SCHEME.

WAS USED BT ANCIENTS. EVIDENCE OF SUN DIALS. The great agitation for summer time clocking, which is a dreesed-up variation of the older daylight-saving scheme, is not novel. It is an attemgt to revive, in a modified form, the customs that existed for thousands of years prior to the 12th century, A.D. It has taken the world 600 years to find out that the old system had its advantages in giving the world the full use of the sunshine hours. Recent discoveries of two old-fashioned sun dials in County Down, Ireland, greatly puzzled archaeologists. The dials were found to be in series with another sun dial found long ago in the old church of Kilmalkedar, County Kerry. Facsimiles of this had been unearthed in England. More recently the finding of a very ancient sun dial as Gezer, in South Palestine, considered to date from the 13th century, 8.C., led to the interesting announcement that it was modelled on a scheme similar to the County Down dial, dating from the sixth or seventh century, A.D. The Gezer dial divided the day, by means of 13 ardii, into 12 spaces, or hours; the County Down dial used five radii, and the day was reckoned into four divisions of three spaces, or hours. The Gezer dial illustrates that the working day of the ancients began, winter or summer, at sunrise, and ended at sunset. Therefore the hour varied with the season and in different latitudes. In Western Europe the summer hour would have been 40 of our minutes longer than the winter hour. In the early Irish and English dials, not of the type mentioned, the working day was from sunrise to sunset, but the main divisions of time were the five canonical hours (Prime or Matins, terce, sext, none, duodecima or vespers). This was a survival of a system that was in use in Palestine and is referred to in Daniel, where it says that the hours of prayer were three, the 3rd, 6th and 9th hours. The Christians added the first and twelfth ac hours of prayer. Long before the Christian era the Greeks, Egyptians and Romans used the water clock to schedule the night hours; and it was adjusted to measure the length of the night hours whether in winter or summer. In later times, in West Europe, demarkated candles were used to tally the hours of darkness; and later still came the hour glass. None of these inventions could take heed of the inequalities of the solar time due to changes of season. In the 13th centurr, AD., clock, worked by weights, and the escapement wheel operated by a pendS ium The_ inventions sounded the death a 1 hour,f Un^ U - al hours - an <* made natural «„ Wt,flcial real and 3-2 ap 0 TatX4T P re^