Did you ever, at the end of a journey—perhaps across water, or up to the top of some high hill—look backward to the place from whence you came, and wonder that it seemed so far away?

Now as we have completed our journey together through the history of man's struggle to gain knowledge and control over time, we are impressed with the great contrast between Time as it was to mankind in the beginning, and Time as it is to us to-day.

The caveman, with whom we began this story, lived close to nature, taking his sense of time from her as he took all else. Morning was when the light came, and he waked and was hungry; noon was when the sun was highest, and night was the time of lengthened shadows and the state of darkness. We see these same things, but, for us, they have not the same meanings. We count the time by hours and minutes, and we reckon these by machines which we have made, called clocks and watches. These mean so much more to us that, when we set all the clocks forward another hour to save daylight, it seemed to us as if we had changed the actual time. It was practically as if we had performed the miracle of Joshua, who in Bible story, made the sun stand still, or the miracle of Isaiah, who made the shadow go back ten steps on the dial of Ahaz. After a few days, we did not feel as if we had set the clocks; we felt as if we had made the sun wait for us, and the very day come earlier.

And so it is with the seasons. The caveman called it spring when the swallows came, and autumn when the leaves changed their color. But we judge of these things by the calendar; we say that the spring "is very late this year," or that the "leaves are beginning to turn early." We have a proverb that one swallow does not make a summer; no, nor do all the swallows, so far as we moderns are concerned. It is summer for us upon a certain day, no matter what the swallows do, but for the caveman, summer was when the swallows came, whenever that might be.

It is like that to-day among primitive peoples. The Turk who listens for the crowing of a cock or the braying of an ass to tell him of the hour, or calls the cat to him to look at its eyes and judge the time by the shape of their pupils—he is more like the caveman in this than like ourselves. So is the South Sea Islander, who knows the season of the year from the direction of the trade-winds. So is the patient savage, who cares little as to how long he must wait for the creature he is hunting to come near the spot where he lies hidden.

How different it all is with ourselves! We rise at a certain hour, and so many minutes later we have our breakfast. At such a time, we must be at work. Our work itself is all made of appointments one after another, or of tasks to be finished within a certain time. Our meals, our hours of rest, our meetings with our friends, our recreations, and our pleasures—all these, until, again, at a certain time we go to bed, in order that so many hours of sleep may make us fit for the next day, are measured by the clock and counted out by the tick of a toothed wheel or the regular swing of a pendulum.

We say that the savage has no sense of the value of time. We have, and it is by that fact largely that we are better off than he. Value means measure; you cannot value a thing unless you can measure it exactly. And so because we can measure time, we can see what time is worth to us, and make it worth more. The savage keeps an appointment—when he happens to make one. But we, because we know how long it takes to reach a certain place, or how long a time we need or wish to spend with a certain man, can make and keep many appointments. We can travel like the wind from place to place, because in measuring time we can measure speed, and therefore we can make speed safe and possible. We can talk to a friend a thousand miles away, or signal by electric waves around the world. We do these things because our sense of time has told us that the old way of sending letters and messages was too slow. And so we have set to work to invent ways that should be quicker. We should never have had the telephone, the cable, or the wireless, unless we had cared about time and been able to measure it.

The caveman lived, perhaps, as many years as we—but how much did he do in those years? We, who have learned to measure years and to allot each day or hour to sundry tasks, have made ourselves able to do far more in a life-time—many times more. We do not live a greater number of years, but it is as if we lived many lives in one. We speak of time as we speak of money, of saving and wasting and spending. Well, Time is Money, as Ben Franklin said, but it is something more—Time is Life. And we think of our lives as so much time at our command, and therefore we can make the most of them. The gulf between us and the primitive men is a contrast of living less or more, and our more life comes in great measure from our having learned to measure time.

Everyone has read the story of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp. You will remember that the poor boy came into possession of a lamp which quickly made him the richest and most powerful person in the world, since, through owning it, he could control the service of a mighty genie, able to perform the most incredible tasks.

The modern man—every man—is something like Aladdin, only he is much more powerful. He has the genie of steam to work for him when he pulls the lever, and the genie of electricity ready to serve him if he but press a button. He has many other mighty servants that modern science has given to him, but greatest of all, most useful of all, is the Slave of the Watch which lies in his pocket—mighty Time himself.

This ability to record time and therefore, to control it, is perhaps the greatest of all man's triumphs. Only see what it has done for him! Have you ever thought of yourself as a person of no special importance?—why, you have far more actual power than was possessed by Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or Charlemagne!

You can command forces and can accomplish results that would have made any of these proud autocrats stare in wonder. If you do not stand out above your age, as they did above their ages, it is simply because millions of other people besides yourself also possess these powers. It is undoubtedly true that we are to-day a race of giants, and it is also true that each of our powers is directly or indirectly due to the common fact that we all can keep track of time. For consider that what mankind can accomplish to-day depends upon the ability of people to work together, and that working together would cease if people had no accurate means for telling time.

For example, you make a railway journey upon a matter of importance to you. The first thing that you do is to examine a time-table on which is shown the minute when the train is due to leave. You calculate to yourself how many minutes you must allow for reaching the station, and then look at your watch to see how long you will still have for other work. If you had not watch or clock, or you were dependent merely upon the position of the sun, you might go to the station several hours ahead of time in order to be "on the safe side." During the hours thus saved you can accomplish a great deal of work. It is as though your day had been made several hours longer.

Unseen in your pocket, your watch ticks steadily. You trust it absolutely, and you know that it will be faithful to its trust. Occasionally you glance at it and, when the hand reached the limit of safety, you start for the train. You reach the station three or four minutes before train-time and find the tracks clear; no train is in sight.

This however, does not cause you the least uneasiness. You merely take your watch from your pocket and look expectantly up the line. Perhaps a minute before the train is due, you hear a distant whistle, then the approaching roar of wheels upon the rails, and, just as the watch-hand reaches the proper moment, the train itself whirls round the curve and draws up to the station, exactly on time.

As you proceed upon your way, you notice how other people at other stations are also meeting their schedules and conserving their time. You see the conductor glance at his watch as he gives the engineer the starting-signal. You realize that the whole transportation system is merely an enormous piece of clockwork and that it, in turn, is a part of the vaster clockwork of modern civilization.

Turn where you will, there is nothing that you can do and nothing that you can use which is not dependent upon the ticking of clockwork. The locomotive which pulls your train, the cars in which you ride, the rails over which you pass, all of these are products of factories, but the factories are run upon the time-basis; there is no other way in which they could be run.

The workmen in these factories leave their records upon time-clocks when they come and when they go. If the workmen were not there at the same time, the work could not be done, since most of modern work depends upon the ability of people to work together at the same task. Even if one man were late, it might lose time for many. The clothes that you wear come from other factories where other workmen have time-clocks and watches. The buildings that you see from the windows were put up on the time-basis and were paid for according to the movement of the hands upon watch dials.

You buy a newspaper, making sure that you are getting the latest edition, and it is at once as though you looked into a great mirror reflecting the activities of all the world, but all of the dispatches bear a date-line, and many of them are also marked with the hour.

Before the days of newspapers, people felt themselves to be a part of the lives of their own immediate neighborhood and knew only vaguely of what went on at a distance, but now each day one feels himself to be a part of the great human family and can sometimes make his plans with reference to things that may be occurring thousands of miles away. But the newspaper itself is a product of clockwork; there is perhaps no institution whose workers keep closer track of the passage of the minutes.

In view of all these things, does it seem too much to claim that if all the timepieces in existence were destroyed and men were given no other means for telling time, civilization would swiftly drop to pieces and man would find himself traveling backward to the conditions of the caveman?

But there is one thing in our modern timekeeping which we still have in common with the first men who ever kept the time. We still go by the sun and the stars and refer all our measure to that apparent revolution of the heavens which we know to be really the motion of our world itself. As did those wise men of old Babylon, so do we even now, spying upon the mighty master clock of the universe to correct all our little timepieces thereby. A man sits alone in an observatory, with his eye to a telescope. That telescope is of a certain kind, called a "transit." It is fixed upon the meridian, the north-and-south line in the sky over that place. And a thread of spider-web across the lens marks for him the exact position of the line, in the very middle of his field of view. So as he watches, he can see one star after another come into view at one side of the glass and pass across it to the other side and disappear. He is watching the world go round.

A certain star appears, one which his calculations have told him will cross the meridian at a certain particular instant. Beside him is an electrical device connected with a clock, which marks off seconds at intervals round a revolving drum. The star draws nearer to the center of his field. As it crosses the hair-line, the observer touches a key, and the precise instant of its crossing is recorded upon the drum, to within a fraction of a second. Since the clock has marked its record of the seconds there, the clock can be corrected by the star.

Now, if that man had been a priest in Babylon, he would have kept his knowledge as a means of power to himself and to his equals. If he had been a dweller in a somewhat later age, he would have kept it to himself no less, either because people would not believe, or because the claim of too deep knowledge of the secrets of nature might put his life in danger. But he is a modern, and so his knowledge is for all who seek it.

On some tall building in a distant city, a time-ball hangs suspended at the top of its pole, and people pause to look up at it. They hold their watches in their hands. Upon the tick of noon, an impulse will come from the observatory, and the ball will drop. Then those who have been looking will set the hands of their watches and pass on. At the same instant, the news of noon will be flashed by telegraph across the land, and by wireless to ships at sea. The whole Western Union system will suspend business for a little, while the lines are connected and the observatory at Washington ticks off the seconds. Everywhere there are electric clocks, automatically controlled by some master clock, which, in its turn is governed by the observatory time. So we all, as a matter of course and without thinking, set our watches by the star. Civilization every day catches step with the heavenly bodies.

Back of all that we see of life, therefore, stands the great fact of measuring time, and those who are engaged in giving to man the instruments for this purpose have a special responsibility. Perhaps the ancient peoples were not so far wrong when they permitted time-telling to be a privilege of the priests. It is far more than a matter of moneymaking; it is a fixing for humanity of the standards of daily life; it is a duty which lies at the foundation of modern efficiency; it is even a sacred trust.

Therefore, the man who makes or sells unreliable timepieces is false to his trust. Through his action people are thrown out of adjustment with the world about them, and they, in turn may seriously interfere with the plans of many others. It is hard to believe that there are some people who still look upon a watch as "jewelry," or that there are some dealers who are more interested in the watch-case than in the movement it contains.

The watchman of olden times was a public officer. He was chosen for his reliability, and people felt confidence when he called the hours. The watch-dealer of to-day is in a somewhat similar position; he has a serious duty to his community. He is not chosen by the public, and yet, even more than the watchman, he is a public servant since the watches that he puts into people's pockets are their principal means of adjustment to the busy affairs of life. In a sense, he supplies them with the basis of their efficiency. His duty is that of supplying the largest practicable degree of accuracy to the largest possible number of people. The Slave of the Watch will not obey the owner of an inaccurate timepiece.

Time itself is elemental; it had no beginning, it can have no ending. It is like a great ocean which flows round all of the earth, and neither begins nor ends in any one place. But time for any man is exactly according to his use of it. It is as though a man were to go to the shore of the boundless ocean, with a tin cup in his hand. If he could get no more than a cupful of water, it would not be because of any limit in the amount available, but merely in his means for carrying it away. Should he have a pail, a barrel, or any larger receptacle, then the water would belong to him in a correspondingly larger amount.

Thus, time each day presents itself equally to everyone upon the earth, but some receive it in cups, some in pails, and some in barrels. Some make of their day a thing of no results, while others fill it with real achievement. Those who achieve are they who have learned to value time, and to make it serve them as the mighty genie that it is.

These are the wonders which Kipling had in mind when he wrote: