Show some big figures from the london time it would bo curious to know many of your renders have fully home to their inner conscious ness the real significance ot little word billion which wo have een of late so glibly used in our colu there are no doubt many thousands who can not appreciate its true worth even when reduced to fragments for more easy assimilation its arithmetical symbol is simple and without much there are no largo figures just a followed by a dozen ciphers and that is all let us briefly take a glance nt it as a measure of time and weight As it measure time I would take one second as the unit nd carry myself in thought through ages back to the first day of the year I ol 01 our era that in all years wo have days and in every day just seconds of time hence in returning in thought back again to this year of grace aso one might have supposed that a billion of seconds had long since clad cd but tah is nol o wo have not passed IG of thil number in all thoe fona eventful years for it takes just years days 22 hours 45 minutes and seconds to conati tute a billion of seconds of time it is no easy matter to bring under tho cognizance of ahe human eye a billion objects of any kind let us try in imagination to arrange this number for inspection and for allm purpose would select a sovereign as a fi object let w put one on the ground and pile upon it as many as will reach twenty feet in height then let us lace numbers of similar columns in close contact forming a straight line and making a sort of wall twenty feet high showing only the thin adgas of the coin Ii ragine two such walls running parallel to each other and forming as it were a long street we must ehni keep on extending theeo walla for filoi nay hundreds of mil and still we abali be far required number and it is not until we have extended our imaginary threet to a distance of 2386 mile that wo shall have presented for inspection our one billion ot coins for a measure cf height let MI ake much smaller unit as our measure in rod ana ahin sheet of paper on those lines are primed ii hid out axt and firmly pressed tope her us in ft well bound book would represent ft measure of about 1333 of an inch in t lickness lei us see how high adease pile formed by billion ot these abin paper iravea would reach we must in them vertically upwards i degree reaching to th highto four spires and passing these atit FJ peak of the Himalaya and up from ali en ce through the fleecy clouds pass beyond the confines ol 01 our attenuated atmosphere and leap up anti inti the blue ether with which the universe is filled standing proud ly up far beyond the reach of all terrestrial terr estial things still pile on your thousands and millions of thin leaves ifor we are only beginning beg ining to rear the mighty mass add millions of sheets and thousands of miles on these and still the number will lack ita due amount let us pause to look fit the neat plowed edges of the book before us see how closely lie the thin flakes f paper how many there are in the HICK width of a span and then aurit ou eyes in imagination upward 10 our mighty column of sheets it now contrina cont nina iti appoint ed number and our sheet bf the tims upon each ather and primed iata a compact mass has re eclied nit alti tude of miles who have akan ho trouble to follow me thus far will I think agree with me that is a fearful thing and that lew can appreciate its real value aa for and trillion they are simply words mere words wholly incapable of adequately themselves on the human intellect |