(John pointed out an error, and I found another typo, and fixed the hard returns. Here it is again.)
A lengthy footnote from page 69 of �The Map that Changed the World,� by Simon Winchester (author of the bestseller �The Professor and the Madman,� which some of you OED fans may have read): �In Korea there has long been a tacit recognition that small earthly processes, carried out over millions of years, can in the end have a geologically significant result. There is in Korean mythology a famous measuring unit that denotes a era long period of time. To gauge how long that period is, one is asked to imagine a mountain made of solid granite, exactly one mile high. Once every thousand years an angel flies down from heaven and brushes the summit of the hill with her wings. The unit of time represents the number of years it would take for the angel and her summit-brushing wing to erode the mountain down to sea level. Given long enough, of course, she would do it. As would a stream, or even the wind--providing that geological time was encompassing enough�and was far, far longer than the mere six millennia allowed by Bishop Ussher.� (bold added) The obvious question is this: did Korean mythology really use a �mile� as a unit of measurement? (Bishop James Ussher was an Irish prelate who published �Annals of the World,� in 1650, wherein he �calculated� that Creation began on Monday, 23 October 4004 B.C., at 9:00 a.m. in the morning. One cannot help but wonder which time zone God was in when he started at 9:00 a.m.) The book is a delightful scientific history, although I do not recall seeing a single non-English unit of measurement in it. Of course, since its subject matter covers roughly 1760 to 1850 in England, that it not at all surprising. Jim Elwell
