ts, would be no longer than 25-1/2 of our
present days; if our life were actually reduced to that period (so as
to regain our present units of perception) we should be old and
grey-headed before the sun had risen for the twenty-fifth time since
our birth. If our unit of perception, with our length of life, were
again reduced a thousandfold, the whole of our life of seventy years
would now only be equal to forty-three minutes, and, in the whole of
that life, we could only see the sun move ten degrees, namely, twenty
of its own diameters in the heaven; if we were born, say, at noon on
midsummer's day, we could never have any idea of anything but daytime,
and neither our fathers, nor grandfathers, nor great-grandfathers for
fifteen generations before them could have seen the sun rise; but
there would have been a tradition, handed down from a far distant past
generation, that a long time ago, beyond the memory of man, there was
no sun at all, everything was pitch dark, and that time was called the
"Great Shadow." If their records could have gone still further back
for the same length of time they would have heard that, before the
"Great Shadow," the sun was always shining in the heavens, and that
that great "Sun" day lasted twice as long as the great shadow.

To understand more clearly this subject of Time perception let me put
another aspect before you; we are looking, say, at an insect whose
wings are beating several thousand times per second, and, with our
vision limited to six times per second, it would be impossible to
count the number of hairs on that wing, or to see which of those hairs
were split, or were bent from the straight, but, if we travelled away
from that insect into space at the rate of light, and were looking
back, the present would then always be with us; the wing, although
still vibrating at that enormous rate, would appear to be stationary,
and so would every other moving thing on the earth, however quick its
movement, and everything would continue in that motionless state for a
million years, provided we continued our flight with the rays of
light. If we travelled a little slower than light, say one minute less
in a thousand years, the same scene would be presented to us, but,
that which was acted upon this earth during one minute of Time, would
now take a thousand years to accomplish; the swiftest railway train
would appear standing still, it would take 5-3/4 days and nights to
cover each inch of gro