Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 February 1893 — Days Five or Six Honrs Long. [ARTICLE]

Days Five or Six Honrs Long.

As the evidence of the earth’s crust proves that our globe has lasted for incalculable ages, it becomes of interest to .think how far the gradual elongation of the day may have attained significant proportions since veiy early times. It may be that even in a thousand years the effect of the tides is not sufficient to alter the length of a day by so much as a single second. But the effect may be very appreciable or even large in a million years, or ten million years, or a hundred million years. We have the best reasons for knowing that in intervals of time comparable with those I have mentioned theohange in the length of the day may have amounted not merely to seconds or minutes but even to hours. Looking into the remote past, there was a time at which this globe spun around in twenty-three hours, instead of twenty-four; at a still earlier period the rate must have been twenty hours, and the further we look back the more and more rapidly does the earth appear to be spinning. At last as we strain our gaze to some epoch so excessively remote that it appears to have been anterior to those ohanges which geology recognizes, we see that our globe was spinning round in a period of six hours, or five hours, or possibly even less. Here then is a lesson which the tides have taught us; they have shown that It the causes at present in operation have subsisted without interruption for a sufficiently long period in the past, the day must have gradually grown to its present length from an Initial cqnditlon in which the earth seems to have spun around four times as quickly as it does at present. —Good Words. Ir persons would bring to bear the same amuunt ot common sense in buying a remedy tor bronchitis, cough, cold aud croup that they do In the purchase of their family supplies, they would never fall to procure Dr. Bull’s Cough Syrup,