The Newtown bee., 1880-03-10
SOME BIG FIGURES.
AZ Thing or Two Showing What a BiI
 lion Is.


 many of your readers have brought fully home to their inner consciousness the real significance of that little word billion which we have seen of late so glibly used in your columns. There are, doubtless, many thousands who cannot appreciate its true worth even when reduced to fragments for more easy assimilation. Its arithmetical symbol is simple and without much pretension; there are no large fgures-just modest 1 followed by dozen ciphers, and that is all.
 Let us briefly take 8 glance at it as 8 measure of time, distance and weight. As a measure of time I would take one second as the unit, and carry myself in thought through the lapse of ages back to the first day of the year of our era, remembering that in all those years we have 365 days, and in every day just 66, 400 seconds of time. Hence, in re- turning in thought back again to this year of grace 1880, one might have SUD- posed that 1000. 1000, ,0OO of seconds had long since elapsed; but this is not so. We have not passed the one-six- teenth of that number in all these long eventful years, for ie takes just 3i, ,6s7 years, r days, 9 hours, 45 minutes and 5 seconds to constitute 1000, 900, 100000 of seconds of time.
 It IS no easy matter to bring under the cognizance of the human eye 1,0O0,- 1000, ,OOO objects of any kind. Let Jus try in imagination to arrange this num- Der for inspection, and for this purpose I would select @ sovereign as familiar object. Let us put one on the ground and pile upon it as many as will reach twenty feet in height; then let us place numbers of similar columns in close contact, forming @ straight line, and making a sort of wall twenty feet high, showing only the thin edges of the coin. Imagine two such walls running parallel to each other and forming, as it were, 8 long street. We must then keep on ex- tending these walls for miles-nay, hundreds of miles, and still we shall be far short of the required number. And it is not until we have extended our imaginary street to distance of 2,3864 miles that we shall have presented for inspection our 100000, 100000 of coins.
 Or in lieu of this arrangement we may place them fiat upon the ground, form ing one continuous line like golden chain, with every link in close contact. But to do this we must pass over land and sea, mountain and valley, desert and plain, crossing the equator and re- turning around the southern hemisphere through the trackless ocean, retrace our way again across the equator, then still on and on, until we again arrive at our starting point; and when we have thus passed a golden chain around the hugh bulk of the earth we shall be but at the beginning of our task. We must drag this imaginary chain no less than 763 times round the globe. If we can fur ther imagine these rows of links laid closely side by side and every one in contact with its neighbor, we shall have formed a golden band around the globe just B feet inches wide, and this will represent our 1000, GOO, ,OOO, ,OOO of coin. Such a chain, if laid in 8 straight line, would reach a fraction over l8,- 328, 445 miles, the weight of which. if estimated at l oz. each sovereign, would be 6, ,975, ,447 tons, and would require for their transport no less than 2,325 ships, each with full cargo of 5000 tons. Even then there would be 8 residue of AT tons, representing 64,08l, ,92O soy ereigns.
 For measure of height let Us take much smaller unit as our measuring rod. The thin sheets of paper on which these lines are printed, ii laid out flat and firmly pressed together as in 8 we'll bound book, would represent a measure of about 1883 of an inch in thickness. Let us see how high dense pile formed by billion of these very thin paper leaves would reach. We must, in imag- ination, pile them vertically upward, by degrees reaching to the height of our tallest spires; and passing these, the pile must still go higher, topping the Alps and the Andes and the highest peaks of the Himalayas, and shooting up from thence through the fleecy clouds, pass beyond the confines of our attenu- ated atmosphere and leap up into the blue ether with which the universe is filled, standing proudly up far beyond the reach of all terrestrial things; still pile on your thousands and millions of thin leaves, for we are only beginning to rear the mighty mass. Add millions on millions of sheets and thousands of miles on these, and still the number will lack it's due amount. Let us pause to look at the neat plowed edges of the book be- fore us. See how closely lie those thin flakes of paper, how many there are in the mere width of a span, and then turn our eyes in imagination upward to our mighty column of accumulated sheets. It now contains its appointed number. and our 1000, ,OO0, ,0O0,000 sheets of the Tunes, superimposed upon each other and pressed into 8 compact mass has reached an altitude of 47, ,348 miles.
 Those who have taken the trouble to follow me thus far will, I think, agree with me that l,c0O. .00O, 900, ,00O is 8 fear ful thing, and that few can appreciate it's real value. As forauadrillions and trillions, they are simply words, mere words, wholly incapable of adequately impressing themselves on the human in- tellect.-Hepry Bessen1ea'. sn London