million in four days and four hours, or say four days only. To count
a million a million times over, he would require four million days,
or roughly ten thousand years; for five hundred millions of millions,
he must have the utterly unrealisable period of five million years.
Yet he actually goes through this stupendous piece of reckoning
unconsciously hour after hour, day after day, it may be for eighty
years, OFTEN IN EACH SECOND of daylight; and how much more by
artificial or subdued light I do not know. He knows whether his eye
is being struck five hundred millions of millions of times, or only
four hundred and eighty-two millions of millions of times. He thus
shows that he estimates or counts each set of vibrations, and
registers them according to his results. If a man writes upon the
back of a British Museum blotting-pad of the common nonpareil
pattern, on which there are some thousands of small spaces each
differing in colour from that which is immediately next to it, his
eye will, nevertheless, without an effort assign its true colour to
each one of these spaces. This implies that he is all the time
counting and taking tally of the difference in the numbers of the
vibrations from each one of the small spaces in question. Yet the
mind that is capable of such stupendous computations as these so long
as it knows nothing about them, makes no little fuss about the
conscious adding together of such almost inconceivably minute numbers
as, we will say, 2730169 and 5790135--or, if these be considered too
large, as 27 and 19. Let the reader remember that he cannot by any
effort bring before his mind the units, not in ones, BUT IN MILLIONS
OF MILLIONS of the processes which his visual organs are undergoing
second after second from dawn till dark, and then let him demur if he
will to the possibility of the existence in a germ, of currents and
undercurrents, and rhythms and counter rhythms, also by the million
of millions--each one of which, on being overtaken by the rhythm from