The Rev. C. A. S. Dwight, in an article on “Timing the Sun,” writes as
follows:
There is a story of a punctilious Yankee who was fond of
boasting that his watch had never been slow or fast for forty
years. One morning he rose to see the sun rise. He kept looking
at his wonderful watch and consulting at the same time a
farmers’ almanac. There was a pause in the dawn. The Yankee grew
impatient. Tapping his watch, he exclaimed: “If that sun ain’t
over the hill in a minute and a half he’ll be late!”
Some men have “views” which they have carefully carried with
them for years, as that Yankee did his watch. If events do not
square with their views, so much the worse for the events. All
such measurings of the eternal by the local tests of human
opinion or of conventional standards is vain. The sun knows what
he is about. It is the part of wisdom to correct one’s timepiece
by the sun and not to try to run unassisted the astronomical
machinery of the whole universe.
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