Minute

“ Hush, Louisa! Don't let me hear that odious excuse again. Suppose it was only for a minute. Have you any more right to do wrong for a minute than for a day? You are always saying—'only a minute,' 'just a minute,' but your minutes are very apt to lengthen into hours. It was your stopping 'just a minute' when you were sent on an important errand which almost cost the poor little baby its life, last summer. It is your stopping 'just a minute' to read or play or do something else to please yourself, which makes you late at breakfast, at school, and at church ”

“ Now a minute is a mighty long time, you measure it and see, and twenty minutes is twenty times as long, and the old man all that while had been grubbing about in a wood full of devils armed with poison arrows and shark-tooth spears looking for suitable places to plant his nuts. ”

“ From ‘minutus,’ the Latin participle of the verb ‘minuo,’ come the English adjective ‘minúte’ and the noun ‘mínute.’ Properly ‘minuto primo’ was, in Italian, the first division of the hour; ‘minuto secondo’ was the second, and ‘minuto terzo’ the third division; which is, in French, ‘tierce,’ i.e. the sixtieth part of a second. The English word ‘mite’ is only a contraction of minute—it is a minute insect; and a ‘minuet’ is a dance with short steps. ”

“ Is not a day divided into twenty-four hours, each hour into sixty minutes, and every minute sub-divided into sixty seconds? Now in 86,400 seconds very many things can be done.” ”

“ It was impossible to judge the flight of time. I measured five minutes by counting my pulse, allowing seventy-two beats to the minute. But it took eternities, and toward the last I found it hard to count ”

“ The motions of the hour and minute hands of a watch may serve to give some idea of the periodical and synodical revolutions of the moon; for when the minute hand has performed a complete revolution, it has yet some distance to go to obtain a coincidence with the hour hand, similar to that which it had the preceding hour. ”

“ I never leave my house without ascertaining the exact number of minutes in the day, and take care that my watch is exact to the time, for a minute more or less would make all the difference in the world. ”

“ For if we suppose the time marked to be an hour, the space passed over by the minute hand, that is, the circumference of the dial, has no relation with the hour except what the artificer gave it by so constructing the watch that the minute hand would make one revolution every hour. ”

“ Did you ever see a man who had not ridden a mile a minute, or who did not think he had? ("A mile a minute" is a bit of flippant talk, like the man's who declared of a certain Fourth of July that he had seen a hundred better celebrations.) ”

“ So that when an hour or two passes, like one minute,—no, not a minute, not a second,—there is no time at all, just as when you fall asleep and get up again. If you fall asleep, you know that much time has passed since you went asleep ”

“ That gives them a chance of doing something." He seemed surprised that I had not brought an unfinished drawing. The minute hand of the clock had fallen over two minute marks, as they sometimes do on their downward course from three to four, and it was fast approaching four, which was the limit of the twenty minutes. We talked on, but the next time I looked at the clock I became confused, for the hour and the minute hand had merged into one, and after that I could not tell one from the other. ”

“ These questions lead us at once into another department of inquiry of immense importance in science—the measurement of time, and more especially the measurement of minute periods of time. We all recognise more or less the value of time, and the busier we are the more we value what we call fragments of time. On a long summer day in the holidays, when we have not much to do except gratefully to enjoy the beauties of nature and the sense of physical well-being, a quarter of an hour, or even an hour, is not appreciated as of much value ”

“ The face of the clock. The hands, like black daggers, had pointed to ten minutes of one. Ten minutes of life! Ten minutes to live! Or—less?
Silence, broken only by the reluctant click-clack, click-clack of the rosewood clock. ”

“ In painting or writing, hours are melted almost into minutes: the mind, absorbed in the eagerness of its pursuit, forgets the time necessary to accomplish it; and, indeed, the clock often finds us employed on the same thought or part of a picture that occupied us when it struck last. ”

“ The Several Branches of a Great Art.—The timekeeper—whether it be the scientific astronomical clock, or the chronometer used by mariners, or the modern watch, minute in size but recording time with accuracy, or the bracket or table clock, or the long-case clock—has proceeded on parallel lines of development. ”

“ In considering a few puzzles concerning clocks and watches, and the times recorded by their hands under given conditions, it is well that a particular convention should always be kept in mind. It is frequently the case that a solution requires the assumption that the hands can actually record a time involving a minute fraction of a second. ”

“ Our measures of duration dependent on our ideas. The notion of an hour, day, or year, being only the idea I have of the length of certain periodical regular motions, neither of which motions do ever all at once exist, but only in the ideas I have of them in my memory derived from my senses or reflection ; I can with the same ease, and for the same reason, apply it in my thoughts to duration antecedent to all manner of motion, as well as to anything that is but a minute or a day antecedent to the motion that at this very moment the sun is in. All things past are equally and perfectly at rest ”

“ THE COW AND HER CALF.
MINUTES.
WE are but minutes—little things!
Each one furnished with sixty wings,
With which we fly on our unseen track,
And not a minute ever comes back.
We are but minutes; use, use us well,
For how we are used we must one day tell.
Who uses minutes has hours to use;
Who loses minutes whole years must lose.
[Pg 198]
GOING FOR THE LETTERS. AN AUSTRALIAN STORY.
IT was a bitter cold day in the end of the month of January. The morning had been a very unpleasant one—neither frost nor snow, a sort of compound of rain and sleet ”

“ Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. ”

“ Seconds seemed hours; minutes seemed days; hours seemed infinite. Still I was perfectly conscious during the intermissions between the paroxysms. I would look at my watch, and then, after an hour or two, as I thought, would look again, and find that scarcely five minutes had elapsed. ”

“ The day passed. To how many excited and impatient people it seemed to contain more than twenty-four hours! And each hour held far more than sixty minutes! There came no answer, no letter, no telegram! ”

“ When he recovers his senses, the hand of the clock has moved on ten minutes. Torn by fears and suspense, he listens with all his ears. He hears faint movements on the floor above. The minutes pass; twenty minutes pass. ”

“ For how could 'time' be measured in minutes or hours by a woman wearing a blindfold, shut away in the dark, and waiting a verdict that could cause the future to slough away into chill gulfs? And how could 'time' have any meaning when the stars faded out of the sky and a sunset gun boomed farewell to the joys of the physical world? ”

“ If we now examine the clock face, we shall find that the seconds hand is nearly twenty-two divisions behind the minute hand, and if we look at all our eleven times we shall find that only in the last case given above is the seconds hand at this distance. ”

“ To measure time by the state of our feelings would be as futile as an attempt to measure space by the slowness or impetuosity of our movements. Hours dwindle into minutes, and minutes are exaggerated into hours, according to the circumstances under which the mind moves on. ”

“ A clock is just a mechanical invention that ticks off the movements of the sun into seconds and minutes and hours. Both clocks and calendars, therefore, are mere measuring tricks. Time goes on, or does not go on, just the same, whether you possess these inventions or whether you do not possess them. Both clocks and calendars go at the same rate whether Time goes fast or slow. ”

“ Here an inch and a mile are chosen as our standards. In like manner, we speak of so many seconds, or minutes, or hours, or days, or years, choosing that standard of time or duration which is most convenient for our purpose. ”

“ If you set back a clock, even as little as ten minutes, you add that much to the time that has passed. The hour which has just gone by has been made seventy minutes long. Now, no human being has the right to add anything to the past, nor to make hours longer than they were originally [73] made. ”

“ And if you continue: le premier s’appelle janvier, le second s’appelle février, le troisième s’appelle mars, etc., then it is no guesswork at all if the pupils gather both the ordinal numerals and the names of the months. The same may be said of the following sentences—
Le jour se divise en vingt-quatre heures; l’heure se divise en soixante minutes, et la minute en soixante secondes.
[68]
Soixante secondes font une minute; soixante minutes font une heure; vingt-quatre heures font un jour; sept jours font une semaine; cinquante-deux semaines et quelques jours font une année ”

“ I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; For now hath time made me his numb'ring clock: My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, Whereto my finger, like a dial's point, Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. ”

“ Further, the men who got up this scheme said that every day should have not only the same length, but that it should have 24 hours, and of course you know that hours are divided into minutes and minutes into seconds. ”

“ Either you will count twenty-four hours on the clock, or you will stay through all the light of one day, and all the darkness of one night. That is, you will count time either by the Clock or by the Sun.
Now we say that there are 365 days in the year. But there are really a few odd hours and minutes and seconds into the bargain. The reason of this is that the Sun does not go by the Clock in making the days and nights. Sometimes he spends rather more than twenty-four hours by the Clock over a day and night; sometimes he takes less. ”

“ Minutes, hours, days, and years are, then, no more Minutes, Hours, Days, and Years not necessary Measures of duration, necessary to time or duration, than inches, feet, yards, and miles, marked out in any matter, are to extension. For, though we in this part of the universe, by the constant use of them, as of periods set out by the revolutions of the sun, or as known parts of such periods, have fixed the ideas of such lengths of duration in our minds, which we apply to all parts of time whose lengths we would consider ”

“ "But you only have to live one minute at a time, Ruth, and any one can endure anything for one minute at a time!" ”

“ The units of duration, on the other hand, which the time-sense is able to take in at a single stroke, are groups of a few seconds, and within these units very few subdivisions—perhaps forty at most, as we shall presently see—can be clearly discerned. The durations we have practically most to deal with—minutes, hours, and days—have to be symbolically conceived, and constructed by mental addition, after the fashion of those extents of hundreds of miles and upward, which in the field of space are beyond the range of most men's practical interests altogether. ”

“ Every sixty-five or seventy minutes, never varying more than five minutes, day and night, in all seasons and every kind of weather, “Old Faithful” has steadily performed his task since first discovered in 1870 until the present time, and no man can tell for how many centuries before. ”

“ But what minutes! Count them by sensation and not by calendars, and each moment is a day and the race a life. ”

“ and when people are waiting, they are bad judges of time, and every half minute seems like five.” ”

“ For example the absolute time of the moon's periodical revolution would note altered, but being measured by days, that had decreased in length, the period of the moon's revolutions would therefore appear to be longer, and would require an additional number of our minutes or seconds for their movements. ”

“ The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older—that is, the days, the months, and the years do so; whether the hours do so is doubtful, and the minutes and seconds to all appearance remain about the same. ”