BILLIONS.
(To THE EDITOR OF TRH ..seserrirea.-)
Srlt,-.4 think billions are unduly slighted by the Times. I can give definite illustrations both of billions and trillions, meaning by a trillion a billion billions. 1. The ocean (says the " Cyclopmdia Britannica ") contains 290,000,000 cubic miles of water. Each cubic mile contains -5,431,776,000 cubic yards. Therefore in round numbers the ocean contains 5,400 x 300 billion, or 1,620,000 billion cubic yards. Therefore 1,620,000 cubic reds is one-billionth part of the ocean. Now, 162,000 x 10 yards represents a pond 30 feet deep and about 33 acres in superficial area, or to put it another way, a pond 1,620 yards long and 100 yards wide. Roughly, if the Serpentine were 30 feet deep, it would be about a billionth of the ocean.
2. The " Cyclopaclia Britannica" also tells me that a milli- metre cube contains 5,000,000 blood-corpuscles. If so, a square metre of the thickness of one millimetre must contain 5,000,000 X 1,000,000, or five billion blood-corpuscles;' and a cubic metre would contain 5,000 billions of them. Neglecting the difference between metres and yards, the ocean would contain 1,620,000 billion x 5,000 billion, or 8,100,000,000 billion billion, or eight thousand one hundred million trillions of blood-corpuscles. How much blood there is in an average man I do not know, but certainly mach more than would cover a square metre to the depth of a millimetre, so there must be in each of our veins a good many billions of blood-corpuscles—I am, Sir, &c.
Pxmo-nrtmort.
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