Obviously 1 minute is a very small quantity of time compared with a whole week. Indeed, our forefathers considered it small as compared with an hour, and called it “one minùte,” meaning a minute fraction–namely one sixtieth–of an hour. When they came to require still smaller subdivisions of time, they divided each minute into 60 still smaller parts, which, in Queen Elizabeth's days, they called “second minùtes” (i.e.: small quantities of the second order of minuteness). Nowadays we call these small quantities of the second order of smallness “seconds.” But few people know why they are so called.