21 MAY 1927, Page 17

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Your correspondent, "R. K.,"

might have found a slightly earlier allusion in Evelyn's Diary, July 13th, 1654: He [Dr. John Wilkins, Warden of Wadharn College, Oxford] had above in his lodgings and gallery variety of shadows, dyals , a way-wiser, fetc.l." The Oxford English Dictionary, from which this is taken, has one earlier quotation from the year 1651, by R. Child in Hartlib's Legacy (1655), p. 70: I say twenty Ingenuities have been found even in our days, as Watches, Clocks, Way-wisers, [etc.] "—but whether pedometers or cyclometers are here meant does not appear.—