Light Science for Leisure Hours. Richard Anthony Proctor

is now more by about one eighty-fourth part of a second than it was two thousand years ago. At this rate of change, our day would merge into a lunar month in the course of thirty-six thousand millions of years. But after a while, the change will take place more slowly, and some trillion or so of years will elapse before the full change is effected.

      Distant, however, as is the epoch at which the changes we have been considering will become effective, the subject appears to us to have an interest apart from the mere speculative consideration of the future physical condition of our globe. Instead of the recurrence of ever-varying, closely intermingled cycles of fluctuation, we see, now for the first time, the evidence of cosmical decay—a decay which, in its slow progress, may be but the preparation for renewed genesis—but still, a decay which, so far as the races at present subsisting upon the earth are concerned, must be looked upon as finally and completely destructive.2

      (From Chambers’s Journal, October 12, 1867.)