rn, while Shakespeare and Moliere, crowned with summer roses, sipped
their Falernian at their ease beneath the whispering palmwoods of the
Nevsky Prospect, and discussed the details of the play they were to
produce to-morrow in the crowded Colosseum, on the occasion of
Napoleon's reception at Memphis by his victorious brother emperors,
Ramses and Sardanapalus. This is not, as the inexperienced reader may at
first sight imagine, a literal transcript from one of the glowing
descriptions that crowd the beautiful pages of Ouida; it is a faint
attempt to parallel in the brief moment of historical time the glaring
anachronisms perpetually committed as regards the vast lapse of
geological chronology even by well-informed and intelligent people.

We must remember, then, that in dealing with geological time we are
dealing with a positively awe-inspiring and unimaginable series of aeons,
each of which occupied its own enormous and incalculable epoch, and each
of which saw the dawn, the rise, the culmination, and the downfall of
innumerable types of plant and animal. On the cosmic clock, by whose
pendulum alone we can faintly measure the dim ages behind us, the brief
lapse of historical time, from the earliest of Egyptian dynasties to
the events narrated in this evening's _Pall Mall_, is less than a
second, less than a unit, less than the smallest item by which we can
possibly guide our blind calculations. To a geologist the temples of
Karnak and the New Law Courts would be absolutely contemporaneous; he
has no means by which he could discriminate in date between a scarabaeus
of Thothmes, a denarius of Antonine, and a bronze farthing of her Most
Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria. Competent authorities have shown good
grounds for believing that the Glacial Epoch ended about 80,000 years
ago; and everything that has happened since the Glacial Epoch is, from
the geological point of view, described as 'recent.' A shell embedded in
a clay cliff sixty or seventy thousand years ago, while short and
swarthy Mongoloids still dwelt undisturbed in Britain, ages before the
irruption of the 'Ancient Britons' of our inadequate school-books, is,
in the eyes of geologists generally, still regarded as purely modern.

But behind that indivisible moment of recent time, that eighty thousand
years which coincides in part with the fraction of a single swing of the
cosmical pendulum, there lie hours, and days, and weeks, and months, and
years, and centuri