Art. LV.—On New Zealand Mean Time, and on the Longitude of the Colonial Observatory, Wellington; with a Note on the Universal Time Question. By Thomas King, Transit Observer, Colonial Observatory. [Read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, 18th March, 1903.] (A.) New Zealand Mean Time. The public attention which has been given of late to the international movement in favour of the adoption of what is known as the universal or standard time system—an extremely convenient scheme for co-ordinating the various clock-times of the world—seems to make it worth while telling how New Zealand settled the question of time-simplification for herself before any proposals for a change had begun to be agitated elsewhere. It is not as commonly understood as it should be that, in arranging a time-reckoning for her own use, this colony as early as 1868 fixed upon practically the very principle which was afterwards embodied in the reform in question, and that she was thus, apparently, the first country in the world to take up the improved system.* See “The Observatory” for July, 1901, vol. xxiv., p. 291, paragraph on “The Time of New Zealand.” It is one of the purposes of the present paper to explain how this came to pass. The question has once before been before this Society, for at a meeting held on the 12th October, 1868, it was dealt with by Dr. (now Sir James) Hector in a paper which will be referred to presently.† “On New Zealand Mean Time” (Trans. N.Z. Inst., vol. i., p. 48; second edition, p. 451). But that was a good long while ago, and in the interval which has elapsed the inevitable oblivion has overtaken the work of those early days. Yet the action of our colony in this matter is not without a certain modest importance for us; and, as the recent progress of the reform in other countries has lent the subject an interest wider than that which it could originally claim, I venture to hope that in discussing it now I shall not be considered open to the charge of needlessly reviving an old story. In the first stages of the colony's existence, and for a considerable period afterwards, no special need was felt for a general system of time-observance. Each district seems to to have kept the approximate local mean solar time of its