MARKING TIME.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5690, 8 October 1896, Page 3

MARKING TIME.

; The gentlemen who- are attempting •to ; arouse public interest in a scheme for altering our method of counting time have hot, if; we- may judge from tho attendance at last night's meeting, achieved much success. Their proposal is none other than the adoption of a different; time for one half of the year, so as to induce the community to make better use of the hours of daylight than they do ' at:pres f ent; ■ It -is suggested that from, say, October till April, the clocks should be put forward two hours, so as to indicate eight o'clock in the morning when it is only six according to the sun. By commencing and leaving off work each day two hours earlier than at present, people would have from throe to five hours of daylight in the evening after the day's toil for open-air recreation. There is much to be said in favour of a proposal that would tend to bring men's habits into closer touch with natural law, but ifc is to be feared that the obstacles in the way of the suggested change are insuperable. At any rate, it would be difficult, if not impossible, lor any portion of the colony to adopt a different time from the rest, as great confusion would arise in the matters of railway aud steamboat time-tables, telegrams, &c. If the movers in this matter mean to advocate a general alteration of public time in New Zealand during the summer months, they have a heavy task before thdiu, and probably years of agitation, to induce Parliament or the Government to sanction the change. If, on the other hand, the idea is to. make an experiment locally, the thing will be found unworkable. In connection with the numeration of hours it is interesting to note that iv Madagascar the natives divide the day into thirty-five parts, each marked by some natural phenomenon, or regular incident in home life. Thus our two o'clock a.m. is the Malagasy "frog croak;" 3 a.m. is "cock crow ;" 5 a.m: is'"crOw croak ;" 5.30 p.m. is "cattle come homo ;". 7 p.m. is " people .begin to cook rice;" 6.30 a.m. is "leaves are dry from dew;" noon is "over the ridge of the roof." The Malagasy houses are oriented, as the scientific would say, so that they serve tho purpose of a dial. If our New Zealand reformers could introduce a method of computing time that would make the change from winter to summer hours self-adjusting and gradual, there might be some hope of success ;• but it is vain to expect people to make a sudden and complete change in their habits by arbitrarily setting the clocks two hours in advance of the sun. The recent vagaries bf the public clock in Christchurch suggest that a more pressing subject for agitation would be the purchase of a timepiece that could be relied upon to mark time correctly according to the system in vogue.