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time having changed the tint of the metallic pigment employed. The white parts have assumed in the course of ages the tint of old ivory, and the colours blend harmoniously now, even if they did not do so when fresh. The decoration seems to have been planned with strict regard to the colour each surface was to receive.

It is not easy for the visitor unaccustomed to Oriental buildings to form a just appreciation of this beautiful palace. He will find much to condemn in its architecture, and may find the repetition of the same désigns monotonous and distressing. The beauty of the ornamentation consists in its exquisite symmetry, and this only becomes apparent on close examination.

AT

THE STRASBURG CLOCK

EDWARD J. WOOD

Strasburg Cathedral is a famous astronomical

clock, about twenty feet high, which is a most ingenious, elaborate, and exquisite piece of mechanical art. This monster clock was preceded by another of similar extraordinary workmanship that was begun in 1352, and was placed in the tower of the cathedral in 1370. It is said that the only existing portion of the original clock is a cock upon the left perpendicular ornament of the machine, which, upon the hourly chiming of the bells, used from the time of its construction to flap its wings, stretch out its neck and crow several times. The present clock was remodelled from the first one by Conradus Dasypodius, Professor of Mathematics at Strasburg, who began his labours on it in 1571, and replaced the clock complete in the south transept of the cathedral in 1574. He appears to have taken several journeys to employ and to consult with the most clever workmen in Germany about this clock, the wheels and movements of which were made by the two Habrechts, natives of Schaffhausen. In 1580 he published, in thin quarto, his treatise Horologii Astronomici argentorati in summo Templo erecti descriptio.

It is related that the original artisan of the clock became

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blind before he had completed his work, but that he finished it notwithstanding his infirmity. Inglis, in his Tyrol, says: "There is a curious circumstance connected with the clock in Strasburg Cathedral, it is of very complicated and delicate workmanship, and the artisan who contrived and made it, becoming blind before he had terminated his labour, it became a question of some difficulty and of much importance how the work was to be completed; the public authorities engaged other mechanics, but they, being ignorant of the design upon which the whole was meant to be constructed, were unable to proceed, and the blind artisan, anxious to reap all the honour himself, not willing that others should have the credit of finishing that which their genius could not have enabled them to begin, refused to communicate any information, but offered to complete the work, blind as he was; and this very wonderful and ingenious piece of mechanism now remains not only a monument of the genius of the maker, but a curious illustration of the power of habit as well as of the acuteness communicated to one sense by the deprivation of another."

The movements of this clock have been thus described: "Herein nine things are to be considered, whereof eight are in the wall; the ninth (and that the most wonderful) stands on the ground three feet from the wall. This is a great globe of the heavens, perfectly described, in which are three motions: one, of the great globe which displays the whole heavens, and moves about from the east to the

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