What is a billion, or, rather, what conception can we form of such a quantity? We may say that a billion is a million of millions, and can easily represent it thus: 1,000,000,000,000. But a schoolboy's calculation will show how entirely the mind is incapable of conceiving such numbers.
If a person were able to count at the rate of two hundred in a minute, and to work without intermission twelve hours in the day, he would take to count a billion 6,944,444 days, or 19,325 years 319 days.
There are living creatures so minute that a hundred millions of them might be comprehended in the space of a cubic inch. They are supplied with organs and tissues, nourished by circulating fluids, which must consist of parts or atoms, in reckoning the size of which we must speak, not of billions, but perchance of billions of billions.
And what is a billion of billions? The number is a quadrillion, and can be easily represented thus: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000; and the same schoolboy's calculation may be employed to show that to count a quadrillion at the rate of two hundred in the minute would require all the inhabitants of the globe, supposing them to be a thousand millions, to count incessantly for 19,025,875 years, or more than three thousand times the period during which the human race has been supposed to be in existence.
These statistics are quoted from an old article by Professor Law, in Jameson's Journal.
THE AVERAGE AGES OF VARIOUS BIRDS.
FOUR LIVE ONE HUNDRED YEARS.
Those That Feed on Flesh Live Longer
Than Those Which Subsist Only on
Grains and Insects.
The doctrines of vegetarianism appear to be slightly shaken by the result of an investigation that an English authority has made into the subject of the longevity of birds. With one notable exception—the swan—the meat-feeding birds are the longest-lived.
The average ages of some of the best known birds are given in the following table: