WHY DOES THE PENDULUM SWING?


The attention of the visitor to the recent Exhibition in Hyde Park was
arrested, as he advanced westwards down the central promenade of the
building, by a large clock busily at work marking off the seconds of
passing time. That piece of mechanism had a remarkably independent and
honest look of its own. The inmost recesses of its breast were freely
bared to the inspection of every passer-by. As if aware of the
importance of the work intrusted to its care, it went on telling, in the
midst of the ever-changing and bustling crowd, with a bold and
unhesitating click, the simple fact it knew; and that there might be no
mistake, it registered what it told in palpable signs transmitted
through the features of its own stolid face. Mr Dent's great clock was
by no means the least distinguished object in the collection of the
world's notabilities.

But there was one thing which nearly concerned that industrious and
trusty monitor that he surely could not have known, or his quiet
countenance would have shewn traces of perturbation. He was doing
Exhibition work, but he was not keeping Exhibition time. The wonderful
building in which he had taken up his temporary residence was, in fact,
of too cosmopolitan a nature to have a time of its own. Its entire
length measured off very nearly 1-42,000th part of the circle of
terrestrial latitude along which it stretched. The meridian of the
Liverpool Model was close upon thirty seconds of space farther west than
the meridian of the Greek Slave. Imagine the surface of Hyde Park to
have been marked off, before Messrs Fox and Henderson's workmen
commenced their labours, by lines running north and south at the equal