14 ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 
real significance of that little word ‘billion’ which we have seen 
of late so glibly used in your columns. There are, indeed, few 
intellects that can fairly grasp it and digest it as a whole; and 
there are, doubtless, many thousands who cannot appreciate its “ 
true worth even when reduced to fragments for more easy 
assimilation. Its arithmetical symbol is simple and without 
much pretension; there are no large figures—just a modest 1 
followed by a dozen ciphers, and that is all. Let us briefly take 
a glance at it as a measure of time, distance, and weight. 
“As a measure of time, I would take one second as the unit, 
and carry myself in thought through the lapse of ages back to_ 
the first day of the year 1 of our era, remembering that in all 
those years we have 365 days, and in every day just 86,400 
seconds of time. Hence, in returning in thought back again to 
this year of grace 1878, one might have supposed that a billion 
of seconds had long since elapsed ; but this is not so. We have 
not even passed one-sixteenth of that number in all these long 
eventful years, for it takes just 31,687 years 17 days 22 hours 
45 minutes and 5 seconds to constitute a billion of seconds of 
time. - 
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“It is no easy matter to bring under the cognizance of the 
human eye a billion objects of any kind. Let us try in imagina- | 
tion to arrange this number for mspection, and for this purpose — | 
I will select a sovereign as a familiar object. Let us putone om ~ 
the ground and pile upon it as many as will reach 20 feet in 
height ; then let us place numbers of similar columns in close 
contact, forming a straight line, and making a sort of wall 20 feet a 
high, showing only the thin edges of the coin. Imagine two — 
such walls running parallel to each other and forming, a8 ib 
were, a long street. We must then keep on extending these 4 
walls for miles—nay, hundreds of miles, and still we shall be — 
far short of the required number. And it is not until we have 
extended our imaginary street to the distance of 2,386} miles 
that we shall have presented for inspection our one billion of 
