A MILLION YEARS.

Waikato Times, Volume XIX, Issue 1622, 25 November 1882, Page 2 (Supplement)

A MILLION YEARS.

Heiie is oneway of conveying to the; mind some icjea of what a million of years reallj&is. , Take a 'narrow strip of paper, an ihcli b|ojd, or more, and 83 ft. 4 in. in length, rtridntßwh it along the TVallg of a large hall, or rpunstbe,j walls of^a^a'partmentsomewhai over * '$6 ffc* square. ' Eecall to memory the daytf "of your boyhood, so as to get some adequate conception of ' What a period of a hundred yeara is. Then mark off from one of the ends of the strip one-tenth of an inch. The one-tenth of the inch will then represent one hundred years, and the entire length of the strip a million of years. It is well worth making the experiment, just in order to feel the striking impression that it produces on the mind. Could we stand upon the edge of a gorge, a milo and a half in depth, that had been cut - out of the solid rock by a tiny stream,scarcely visible at the bottom of this fearful abys3, and were we informed that this little streamlet was able to wear off annually only one-tenth of an inoh from its rooky bed, what would our conception be of the prodigious length of time that this stream must have taken to excavate the gorge? We should certainly feel startled when, on • making the necessary calculations, we found that the stream had performed this enormous amount 'of work in something less than a million of years. — Croll on u Climate and Time" '