Dodge City times. [volume] (Dodge City, Kan.) 1876-1892, 1880-08-21
"GREENwICH TIME"

HoME-KEEPING youth" rarely guess
when they go abroad TO .'swim in q
gondola" and perform other feats of
similar kind. that one of their most
troublesome tasks will be found in the
daily endeavor to keep time with the
sun. Yet nothing is more certain than
that days and hours have knack OF
getting into a hopeless middle during q
rapid railway ride due east. On steam
boat Journey either to east or west there
is less confusion, for the height of the
sun is taken ON every clear day. The
time problem put in familiar way by
the old ballad writer has been set in
more startling light by a modern French
novelist. The unknown author OF king
John and the Abbot Of Canterbury"
makes the shepherd who personates the
latter tell the capriciOus tyrant in an
swer to the second of his three ques-
tons. '.How soone may ride the whole
world about?" r-ta T O. RI
"You must rise with the sun, and ride with
the same,
Until the next morning he riseth againe:
And then your Grace need not make any
doubt,
How far the writer of this Derry
down. ballad who evidently rewrote
an earlier work, was acquainted with
the Copernican system is not ascer-
tanned, but for the purpose of his story
he adopts the convenient if accurate
theory that the sun moves and not the
earth, which rested, like many more
blunders, on the evidence of the senses.
The modern French novelist is scien-
tifically accurate in the scheme of his
story. In detail NJ. Jules Verne fire.
Guently errs. rs when he speaks of the
chronological Society rs having been
founded s'for the destruction of noxious
insects" but the fact on which his
story is founded is automatically cor
rect Phineas Fogg. when he made his
bet to 90 round the world in eighty
DAYS had no idea that the relation be-
tween sun and earth would help him to
win what he at one moment thought
lost wager Carefully keeping count of
time he imagines that he must have lost;
that he arrived in London on Sunday
instead of Saturday; that his great bet is
forfeited, and that he is ruined. Send
Ing for clergyman to marry him. he
discovers that his bet is not lost, that it
is Saturday instead Of Sunday. How
this comes about is very easy of expla-
nation. Fogg, instead Of 'riding with
the sum-" that is from east to west, rode
for eighty days against it, and thus,
despite his carefully-kep. itinerary,
gained day without knowing it. By
going to the eastward he gained four
minutes for every degree of longitude
he crossed, and as NJ. Jules Verne
naively explains. for the benefit of such
of his countrymen as knew not geo
graphy, there are three hundred and
sixty Of these degrees on the terrestrial
circumference, and these three hundred
and sixty degrees multiplied by four
minutes yield precisely twenty-four
bours-the day unconsciously gained.
In other words. while Phineas Fogg,
travelling eastward, saw the sun at the
meridian eighty times, his friends who
remained in London only saw it pass
seventy-nine times. This is why, on
the day which was Saturday and not
Sunday, as Fogg thought, these friends
were waiting for him at the Reform
Club. In short, the twenty-four hours
which would have been spent iP riding
round the, world with the .s,iA, wefe
gained by riding round It in the oPpo-'
site direction in eighty days.