Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 19.djvu/338

* TIMBUKTU. 290 TIME. the southern borders of the .Sahara desert, lies between a rolling table land on the north and the swamps of the Niger. It has flat, window- less, clay houses : its streets are of s.and and gravel. It was largely in ruins when taken by the French. They have, however, energetically begun introducing iuiprovemcuts, and new streets and European churches and schools have been constructed. Timbuktu is fortified. There is also a fortress at Kabara on the Niger. There are two important and handsome mosques. Timbuktu is notalile for its commerce, and is the focus of the caravan trade in West-Central Africa. The annual value of the transit trade alone is put at $4,000,000. Gums and rubber are perhaps the leading articles. Gold, ivory, wax, salt, hard- ware, beads, and cheap cloth are also prominent items. The trade is chiefly liy barter. The few local manufactures include cottons, leather ar- ticles, and pottery. French goods and money are replacing those of other countries. Tim- buktu is a centre of ilohammedan learning and has a large Mosleiu lilirary. The population, which has greatly diminished in recent times, is about 10.000. The town was founded in 1077 by the Tuareg trilje. It passed through dif- ferent hands, began to be a place of commercial importance in the sixteenth century, and was seized by an army from Morocco in 1591. The Fulahs "drove out the Moors early in the nine- teenth century. Timbuktu was first visited by a European in 1826 — Major Laing, an Englishman. From 1S44 to 1S46 it was again in the hands of the Tuarcgs. In 1863 .hmed el-Bathai drove out the Fulahs for the last time. The town passed into the possession of the French in 1894. Con- sult: Lenz, Timbuktu (Leipzig, 1892); Dubois, Timbitctoo the Mysterious (London, 1896) ; Toutee, Du Dahomi au l^ahara (Paris, 1899). TIM'BY, Theodore Ruggle.s (1822—). An American inventor, born in Dover, N. Y. In 1841 he prepared a model of a revolving battery which he submitted to the military authorities in Wash- ington, and from which he subsequently developed a metallic revolving fort to be used ou land and water, and for tliis in 1862 he obtained a patent for a revolving tower for defensive and offensive warfare. In consequence of this patent he re- ceived a royalty of $5,000 in 1862 for each turret constructed by the builders of the Monitor. His other inventions include a method for firing heavy guns by electricity ( 1861 ) ; a cordon of revolving towers across a channel (1802) ; a mole and tow- er system of defense (1880); a subterranean system of defense (1881) ; and a revolving tower and shield system (1884), for all of which he obtained patents. TIME (AS. tima; connected with tid, OHG. zit, Ger. Zeit, time, Eng. tide, Skt. a-diti, boundless). In the philosophical sense. a term used in the description of the succession of phenomena. Time has been considered by some philosophers to be an illusion; by others to be a confused idea; by others again a form of phenomena, but not a characteristic of ultimate reality; by others to be real but with a qualified sort of reality; by others to be an unqualifiedly real character- istic of the ultimately real world; and by others to be a reality which exists independently of the timed world of objects. For reasons given in the article on Space (q.v.), the most acceptable view is that time has no independent existence, as if it were a kind of vessel whose parts appeared in succession, but that it is real in the sense that the ultimately real world is timed. The ques- tion of the infinity of time is to be solved in the same way as that concerning the infinity of space. In its legal aspect, the meridian of the sun is the generally recognized standard of time, but where persons enter into legal relations expressly with reference to some arbitrary system, as that adopted by railroads for tlieir convenience, the courts will apply the standard contempLated by the parties, in case of a controversy. In com- puting a period of time from a certain day. the general rule is to exclude the first day and in- clude the last day of the count. This rule may be disregarded if it will best effectuate the inten- tion of the parties to an agreement. It is gen- erally held that a policy of insurance includes the last day of the jjeriod named therein. In many States Sunday, or other dies twn. is in- cluded in the computation of a number of days if they exceed a week, that is. seven days, but excluded if less than seven days. In some States a dies turn is included unless it would be the last day of a period. See Dies nox : iloxTii ; D.y. In music, time is the division of a measure into the fractional parts of a whole note. The sign which indicates the character of the subdi- vision, and which consequently regulates the rhythm of tlie movement, is called the time-sig- nature. This is generally a fraction ( J, f, f, etc.) placed after the clef at the beginning of a movement. In the fraction the lower figures represent the kind of notes to be used as time standards, while the upper figure shows how many of them are to be given in a bar. There are two general classes of time, duple and triple; in the former, the number of beats in a bar is divisible by two ; in the latter, by three. Com- mon time, so called, is | and is represented by the sign C. Compound duple time and com- poxuid triple time differ only from their originals in that each beat (containing a dotted note or its equivalent) is divisible by three. See Rhythli ; Tempo. TIME, Reckoxi.xg of. See Ixterx.vtioxaL D.TE Line; Houb; Day; Time, Sta:^dabd. TIME, Standard. The time in common use for regulating the ordinary afl'airs of life. It is derived from the sun. Leaving out of account small irregularities of the solar motion that are of no consequence for our present purpose, when that celestial body is on the meridian of any place we call the time at that place 'noon' or twelve o'clock. (See Equation of Tijie.) It follows that when it is noon at any given place it is similarly noon at all other places having the same meridian, and at places having a different meridian it is either forenoon or afternoon. In fact, as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, it is evident that when it is crossing the meridian of any place it must have already passed that of neighboring places to the eastward, and not yet have reached that of neighboring places to tiie westward. In other words, when it is noon in the given place it is already afternoon in places to the eastward, and still forenoon in places to the westward. The farther east one travels, the later is the local time; and this gives rise to the rather perplexing time differ- ences so familiar to travelers.