EVIDENCE PROVING THE STATEMENT OF THE CASE 19 



now comes the artificial. For convenience we divide 

 this day into twenty-four distinct parts, and we call 

 them hours. These hours we divide into sixty parts, 

 and we call them minutes, and these again we divide 

 into sixty parts, arid we call them seconds. We may 

 regard the second as our unit. Thus there are 86,400 

 seconds in the day. This is purely arbitrary. We 

 might, if we liked, divide the day into a million seconds. 

 Nature has no seconds, minutes, or hours. In the 

 main, all that Nature deals with are two motions of 

 the planet in eternity. 



Eliminating- exact figures, the circumference of the 

 earth at the equator we may take to be nearly 25,000 

 miles, therefore in one second a fixed point or mark 

 at the equator moves in space nearly a third of a mile, 

 or approximately 500 yards. 1 So that when we say 

 we do a thing, or that a thing is done, in a second of 

 time, all that can be meant is, the thing is done during 

 the time a point on the circumference of the earth at 

 the equator moves in space a little less than a third of 

 a mile. This is our standard of time, and this is all. 

 This motion, moreover, is riot constant, so our second 

 varies but inappreciably. Time, therefore, is the 

 measurement of terrestrial motion. 



u Our fundamental standard of time is the period of 

 the earth's rotation the length of the day. The 

 earth is our one standard clock : all time is expressed 



1 " At each pole there can be no velocity, but from these two 

 points towards the equator there i.s a continually increasing rapidity 

 of motion, till at the equator it is equal to a rate of 507 yards in a 

 second." " The rate of rotation has once been much more rapid than 

 it now is." (" Text-book of Geology," Sir Archibald Geikie, F.R.S., 

 .3rd edition, 1893, p. 15.) 



C 2 



