“Ha! that’s the word,” shouted Tom Lokins, “Medoosy, that’s wot the captain calls ’em. Heave ahead, Fred.”
“Well, then,” continued Fred, “the young doctor went on to tell me that he had been counting the matter to himself very carefully, and he found that in every square mile of sea-water there were living about eleven quadrillions, nine hundred and ninety-nine trillions of these little creatures!”
“Oh! hallo! come now!” we all cried, opening our eyes very wide indeed.
“But, I say, how much is that?” inquired Tom Lokins.
“Ah! that’s just what I said to the young doctor, and he said to me, ‘I’ll tell you what, Fred Borders, no man alive understands how much that is, and what’s more, no man ever will; but I’ll give you some notion of what it means;’ and so he told me how long it would take forty thousand men to count that number of eleven quadrillions, nine hundred and ninety-nine trillions, each man of the forty thousand beginning ‘one,’ ‘two,’ ‘three,’ and going on till the sum of the whole added together would make it up. Now, how long d’ye think it would take them?—guess.”
Fred Borders smiled as he said this, and looked round the circle of men.
“I know,” cried one, “it would take the whole forty thousand a week to do it.”
“Oh! nonsense, they could do it easy in two days,” said another.
“That shows how little you know about big numbers,” observed Tom Lokins, knocking the ashes out of his pipe. “I’m pretty sure it couldn’t be done in much less than six months; workin’ hard all day, and makin’ allowance for only one hour off for dinner.”
“You’re all wrong, shipmates,” said Fred Borders. “That young doctor told me that if they’d begun work at the day of creation they would only have just finished the job last year!”