The Earth Grows Older

Lord Rayleigh, distinguished English physicist, son of a former Chan cellor of Cambridge University, published a new estimate of the antiquity of the earth, of between two and three billion years, based on a study of the rate of decomposition of radioactive elements. This is vastly greater than any previous estimate, modern geologists having ranged between 100,000,000 and 1,600,000,000 years in their conjectures. All these estimates rest upon very slender assumptions, but that the age of the earth is to be reckoned in hundreds of millions of years is a scientific certainty. Lord Rayleigh's estimate, if sustained, also revises the probable antiquity of man and the lower animals, indicating that the earth's crust has been capable of supporting life at least 20 times as long as was thought possible before.