Curiosities of Clocks and Watches from the Earliest Times. By
E. J. Wood. (Bentley.)--A very readable account of most of the celebrated clocks and watches in the world, interspersed with anecdotes of every kind connected with watchmaking. The book would have been more perfect had it contained a scientific account, however condensed, of the manufacture of clocks and watches ; but still it is what it professes to be, a collection of and about them. The most costly watch ever made in the world was, it is said, constructed for the Sultan Abdul Medjid in 1844, by Messrs. Hart and Son, which cost twelve hundred guineas. It was, however, five inches in diameter, and had only one specialty, that the hours and quarters were struck on wires, so that the sound resembled that of a powerful cathedral clock, and was in our judgment very inferior to the toy from Geneva exhibited in the Exhibition of 1851, which was a "miniature watch, three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter, inserted in the top of a pencil-case, and indicating on its tiny dial not only the hours, minutes, and seconds, but also the days of the month."
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