Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/758

 738 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

races, but he achieved nothing. Human history at the most extreme calculation does not go back more than 25,000 years. This is also probably as far as archaeologists can safely trace man's works, but it is only a span in the age of the earth. Forty such periods go into 1,000,000 years. It requires 120 of them to make a Tertiary period, and it is scarcely more than one three- thousandth part of the whole term of organic life. But of the real life-history of man less than half of this period can be counted, while practically all human achievement comes within one-fourth of it. Man is but a speck on the surface of the ocean of time as reckoned by geology.

Professor Haeckel in his Weltrdthsel happily characterizes this large view of the time-relations of organic life and of man as the " cosmological perspective," and illustrates it by looking upon the entire period of life on the earth as one great day (Schopfungs-Tag), which is capable of being subdivided into the twenty-four hours of a solar day, the relative lengths of the several geological periods being expressed in hours, minutes, and seconds. One of his students worked out this conception and arrived at the startling result that the historic period, which he placed at 6,000 years, has occupied only five seconds of the creation day!

Haeckel estimates the age of the earth at 100,000,000 years, which is much longer than the estimate accepted by me in the above discussion, viz., 72,000,000, but this latter is even better adapted to the illustration given than was his because a multiple of twenty-four, and the results are still sufficiently striking. I have, however, thought that this might be made still more clear by projecting it upon a dial, and I have constructed one on this numerical basis. In this scheme 3,000,000 years represent one hour, 50,000 one minute, and 833^ one second. If we make the human period 300,000 years, man has existed six minutes of the cosmic day. If we make it 200,000, he has existed four minutes. If we allow the extreme length of 25,000 years for the historic period, it will represent thirty seconds. If we restrict it with Haeckel to 6,000 years, it occupies seven and one-fifth seconds. All of which is calculated both to teach humility and to inspire hope.