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million years is a stretch of time beyond our conception. We can arrive at a more or less adequate understanding of what a million individuals or concrete things means. Several Continental nations can put more than a million men into the field. We can gaze at a building which contains as many bricks; and we know that our own body is composed of millions of millions of cells. No such help applies to time, because that itself is an entirely relative, abstract conception. We can imagine what one hundred years are like—a span of time seemingly short to the hale and hearty octogenarian, enormous to the child, totally inapplicable to certain