We should
live less than a month, and personally know nothing of the change of
seasons. If born in winter, we should believe in summer as we now
believe in the heats of the carboniferous era. The motions of organic
beings would be so slow to our senses as to be inferred, not seen. The
sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from change,
and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis and suppose a being to get
only one 1000th part of the sensations we get in a given time, and
consequently to live 1000 times as long. Winters and summers will be
to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter growing
plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous
creations; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth like
restless boiling water springs; the motions of animals will be as
invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannon-balls; the
sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail
behind him, etc."
5
In his Outline of History Mr. Wells has made a gallant effort to
visualize "the true proportions of historical to geological time"
[Footnote: 1 Vol. II, p. 605. See also James Harvey Robinson, _The
New History,_ p. 239.] On a scale which represents the time from
Columbus to ourselves by three inches of space, the reader would have
to walk 55 feet to see the date of the painters of the Altamara caves,
550 feet to see the earlier Neanderthalers, a mile or so to the last
of the dinosaurs.
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