24 THE WORLD MACHINE 



surroundings ; in the last ten the burden of the journey has 

 begun to be felt. Of the forty remaining, one-third a man 

 passes in an unconscious state he calls sleep. Finding his food 

 and eating it, begetting, reproducing his kind, and hurrying 

 about here and there like the restless ant, consumes the greater 

 part of what is left. Scant wonder if, thus hobbled by the 

 brevity of life, he should advance so little from one generation 

 to the next, or that he should dream of another existence un- 

 ruffled by the urgency of time. 



Seventy times round the track, but the great world runs on 

 how long ? Has it always been whirling along that self- 

 same groove at the selfsame speed ? When did it begin will 

 it ever end ? Bodies so large, traversing intervals of space 

 so fathomless, require obviously for their formation, for their 

 disintegration, corresponding intervals of time, not thousands 

 or millions but rather thousands of millions of years. The fly- 

 wheel of a very ordinary engine will do a thousand revolutions 

 per minute ; it makes its seventy turns in a few seconds, and 

 a good engine may last for years. Whirling around a million 

 or two million times a day, it is easy to see that the number 

 of revolutions it will accomplish in its lifetime mounts into the 

 billions. 



There seems no reason to believe that our heliocentric engine 

 is less stable. It has no valves to clog, no journals to wear ; 

 apparently space offers no resistance to its flight. It is noise- 

 less, it seems to need no oiling, no care no engineer. When 

 was it built ? 



So long as the world seemed not so very big, our earth its 

 centre and its grandest thing the sun, the stars revolving round 

 it in some sort of way ; the simplest explanation of how they 

 all came to be was that they were conjured into existence from 

 the void by an arch-magician, as a spectacle for the gods. And 

 unbiassed by disturbing considerations, it was not deemed pre- 

 sumptuous to assign a date when the performance began. Thus 

 Archbishop Usher ; the good man lived in the brilliant days of 

 Shakespeare and Bacon ; he was fabulously learned in an age 

 of scholars, and spent from the twentieth to the thirty-eighth 

 year of his life reading the entire literature of ecclesiastical 

 antiquity. Somewhat to the neglect of his slightly elder con- 

 temporaries, Galileo and Kepler, he succeeded in fixing the 

 creation of the world in the first week of January, 4004 B.C. 



