URGENT! Authenticity of dial on ebay.

[Charles Gann]

There is currently an old sundial up for auction at ebay.com.  It has the inscription: 1701 J. Mills Londini.  The auction ends 7-18-99 at 13:07:28 Pacific Daylight Time.  The item number is #130088066.   I seek the consensus of the list as to whether this dial is authentic or not.  If it is, I could not afford it anyway, but some of you might wish to bid on it.   The seller has some good images of the dial.  The best I can measure, the style has an angle of 28 to 30 degrees.  The 1pm line appears to be around 7 to 8 degrees, and the 7am line appears to be around 56 to 57 degrees.  The hour line angles seem to be a close match to the style angle, but it's hard to tell from the images.  I wonder if the gnomon is original since it doesn't seem to exactly match the hour line angles (again, hard to tell) and it seems a bit out of balance relative to the dial face in that the northern end extends quite a bit too far north in my opinion to be visually pleasing.  The north end of the gnomon also obscures the "N" compass point.   A search on the web revealed a site that lists latin names of places.  "Londini" translates to "London".  I could not find any references to a J. Mills relating to sundials.  Perhaps there is a listing for a J. Mills in the BSS archives.   Assuming the dial to be genuine, I had to wonder, where did the British have a presence at 28-30 deg N lat. in 1701?  A wild speculation on my part would be northern India.  A further search on the web revealed that the British were in India as early as 1701.  I also noted that the latitude of Delhi (New Delhi) is a reasonable match for this dial.   Also, why would the maker use "Londini" rather than "London"?  Was it a common practice in 1701 to use latin place names on dials?   At any rate, it was fun to speculate on this dial.  Please go to ebay and take a look for yourselves.  If the list consensus is that the dial is authentic, then some of you with more money than me can fight over it!  ;)   Happy Dialling   Charles