events. In dying, we duplicate on a big and prolonged scale our
little daily sleeps in life.

If a man were told that after death his soul would not regain
consciousness for a thousand millions of years, he would worry,
and complain of the "long time." But it would make no difference
to him whether the time were a thousand millions of years or
forty seconds--time would not exist for him; he would not know
the difference.

There is little doubt that to the ephemeridae, creatures that
live but for a day, that day must seem as long as our century,
for in their life of incessant activity and agitation every
second is a long space. And there is no doubt that to the giant
turtles of the Galapagos Islands, heavy monsters that live ten
centuries or longer, a week is a fraction of time far less
important than an hour to us. ----

A mysterious thing is time and its divisions. Man manufactures a
watch capable of registering a fraction of a second. And in the
force called light we have a power that can go seven times around
the world in one second.

We estimate our time by years. It takes one year for our little
earth to spin round the sun. And during that year it turns three
hundred and sixty-five times on its own axis. While the entire
body of our earth flies through space, accompanying the sun on
its journey, the northern extremity of our planet has a separate
circular motion of its own. This circular motion takes
twenty-seven thousand years to complete one circle, and as it