The PRESIDENT.  The Chair would inquire of the Conference whether the recommendations and remarks which were sent in print to the Delegates a few days ago by Mr. SANDFORD FLEMING, the Delegate of Great Britain, may be entered upon the protocol as presented to-day.  Each member was, it is understood, furnished with a copy of these papers.

Mr. TUPPER, Delegate of Chili.  The Delegates of Chili have not received them.

The PRESIDENT.  The Chair will take care that they are sent.

No objection was made to the request of the Delegate of Great Britain, Mr. SANDFORD FLEMING, who continued as follows: 

The adoption of a Prime Meridian, common to all nations, admits of the establishment of a system of reckoning time equally satisfactory to our reason and our necessities.

At present we are without such a system.  The mode of notation followed by common usage from time immemorial, whatever its applicability to limited areas, when extended to a vast continent, with a net-work of lines of railway and telegraph, has led to confusion and created many difficulties.  Further, it is insufficient for the purposes of scientific investigation, so marked a feature of modern inquiry.

Taking the globe as a whole, it is not now possible precisely to define when a year or a month or a week begins.  There is no such interval of time as the commonly defined day everywhere and invariable.  By our accepted definition, a day is local; it is limited to a single meridian.  At some point on the earth’s surface one day is always at its commencement and another always ending.  Thus, while the earth makes one diurnal revolution, we have continually many days in different stages of progress on our planet.

Necessarily the hours and minutes partake of this normal irregularity.  Clocks, the most perfect in mechanism, disagree if they differ in longitude.  Indeed, if clocks are set to true time, as it is now designated, they must, at least in theory, vary not only in the same State or county, but to some extent in the same city.

As we contemplate the general advance in knowledge, we cannot but feel surprised that these ambiguities and anomalies should be found, especially as they have been so long known and felt.  In the early conditions of the human race, when existence was free from the complications which civilization has led to; in the days when tribes followed pastoral pursuits and each community was isolated from the other; when commerce was confined to few cities, and intercommunication between distant countries rare and difficult; in those days there was no requirement for a common system of uniform time.  No inconvenience was felt in each locality having its own separate and distinct reckoning.  But the conditions under which we live are no longer the same.  The application of science to the means of locomotion and to the instantaneous transmission of thought and speech have gradually contracted space