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Show I -' m --: THE EARTH'S " AGE. i t 1 While Austria was in a turmoil over the assassination of Dictator Dolfuss some weeks ago, a patient scientist, Miss Edith Kroupa, of the University of Vienna, was examining and analyzng a tiny bit of mineral, seeking further knowledge of the antiquity an-tiquity of the earth. The mineral she studied with painstaking pains-taking care was a mere speck, about one-hundredth of an ounce of a substance sub-stance known to geologists as mona-zite, mona-zite, sent from Canada, where it had been found to possess peculiar radioactive radio-active properties, somewhat similar to those of radium. By methods well known to scientists, scien-tists, radioactive substances have been employed to determine the age of the earth through observing their rate of disintegration. Using radium, it has been computed that our planet must be not less than 1,850.000,000 years old. Miss Kroupa's stud'es suggested sug-gested an age of about 1,725,000,000 years. Without quibbling over a discrepancy discre-pancy of only a hundred million or so of years, it is now quite generally accepted that the earth has been spinning spin-ning in space between one and a half : to two billion years, and perhaps longer. This great age, as determined by modem science, is in marked contrast with that computed by Archbishop Ussher, the eminent Irish divine, who 300 years ago placed the date of the creation at 4004 B. C. |