THE AGE OF THE WORLD.

Waikato Times, Volume V, Issue 301, 16 April 1874, Page 2

THE AGE OF THE WORLD.

Writing upon the- above subject, a Paris correspondent says: — " The age of tho world, according to Ussher, dates from 4004 years beforo the Christian era- ; the Jews fix its age at 8397 rears. The savnns have also their chronology. An English oat can live 1500 years, and a. Scotch yew 3000 ; tho monkey-bread tree endures from five to six thousand years ; the age of tbe ' bald cypress,' — whose trunk measures 117 feet in circumference — on the road from Vern-Cruz to Mexico, and under whose shade Cortez and his army reposed, is fixed at 6000 years by de Candolte ; feho mammoth trees of California are similarly estimated in point of age. The pile dwellings of the Swiss marshe* according to Morlot, can count 6750 years, who also estimates tho skeleton found in the Lower Delta of the Nilo, as oxiitinjj five or 3even thousand years ago, and tho ' baked brick ' discovered in tho mud of tho Nilo at a depth of 56 feot, is calculated by Homer to bo 12,000 years old. Tbe human fossils found by the Comte de Pourtales in Florida, are. according to Agassiz, 10,000 yoars old ; Lyell estimates Hie famous fragments of Oaglion pottery to have been made 12,000 yeari ago, and fixes at 50,000 years the period necessary to produco the ocean upheavings on tho coast of Norway, which is the • ime as allotted bv Dawler to the human skeleton found by him near New Orleans underneath the remains of four distinct forests. Lyell calculates that the alluvial bed of tho Mississippi, has existed sines 100,000 years, tho lame and corresponding with the epoch of tho flint instruments discovered in the alluvium of the Soinme. The coral formation of Lower Florida, formed from the debris of inseots, shells, &c., and. corresponding with living types, i« asserted by Agassiz to be 135,000 years old, and Rnmsay and Lyell sot down the glacial period which disturbed Wales at 224,000 yearg. Some stars are so distant from us that their light, though travelling at tho rate of 190,000 miles per second, would requiro millions of years to reaoh us. Our globe, whioh js supposed by some to have been once in a state of white heat, rnu6t have takon, according to Hauton, eighteen millions of j-esrs to cool dowta 76 degree*.