It is calculated that our earth must be losing time, by tidal retardation, at the rate of one-half the moon's diameter in each twelve hundred years (see Proctor, "Light Science for Leisure Hours,"--"Our Chief Timepiece Losing Time"), and that "the length of a day is now more by about one eighty-fourth part of a second than it was two thousand years ago." Perhaps, however, we may discover that these changes are themselves periodic and increase in cycles to a maximum, and then diminish, as is the case with magnetic, planetary, and stellar variations, and other similar changes, when sufficiently long observed; for while such changes may very well accompany a theory under which our system and all other systems are slowly running down to decay and death, it is entirely incompatible with the primal forces under which they must have been originally formed. In other words, if the tides are dragging back our earth without compensation, this dragging back can only come from the oceanic deposit of water on the earth from the aqueous vapors of space which do not partake of the planetary rotation and orbital movement of the earth. But if these can now retard the earth's motion, they must have originally prevented it in the beginning. This loss of time is, moreover, merely inferential from mathematical computations, and its basis is found in the belief that all the operations of nature are in a slow process of degradation, and the calculated loss itself may be merely theoretical, and not true in fact. Professor Proctor himself concedes the uncertainty of this alleged retardation when he says in the same article, "At this rate of change our day would merge into a lunar month in the course of thirty-six thousand millions of years. But after a while the change will take place more slowly, and some trillion or so of years will elapse before the full change is effected." While the processes of nature are generally believed to be running down, everything is bent to that belief; but the forces of nature must, nevertheless, be uniform and supreme, for it is by these forces that the expected results are to be achieved. That changes occur constantly is inevitable, but the source of these must be looked for in the interaction of original forces, and not in the degradation of systems. There is reason to believe, in fact, that the repulsion of the terrestrial electrosphere by that of the moon may itself be sufficient to counteract such retarding force of lunar gravity, for the tides upon earth are not merely oceanic, but atmospheric, and on the latter the electrical repulsion of the moon must act very powerfully and with directly counteractive effect.