Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IY. THE EARTH IN SPACE. It is certain that we live on an earth that is round, and that is exceedingly large. If the seas were turned into dry land, so that you could walk all round the earth, it would take seven or eight years for you to do it. And this round earth is all by itself. It does not touch the sun, the moon, the stars, but is, in fact, far away from any one of them. You stand on the solid earth itself. Now what else is around you ? Well, there is first the air that you breathe. You know it is there, although you can not see it. You can feel it when you breathe it. Is there any other way that you can feel it ? Yes?of course the wind that blows against your face is nothing but air moving. When there is no wind youhardly know that there is any air at all, but when the wind blows there is no doubt about it. Some one has made a kind of a picture of the earth and the air, which is copied here. The earth is the black globe in the middle and the air is the circles in the draw ing. In the picture thay have given only a part of the earth, leaving you to imagine the rest. You can do that, can’t you ? And you must think of the earth as a globe with air all around it. In the picture they have called the air atmosphere, which is the scientific name for it. It really means vapor-sphere, that is, the sphere or globe that holds the vapor, the fogs, the clouds, and the air. This is not a real picture, like a photograph, which shows just how the earth, and its atmosphere would look to a person on the moon for example; it is rather more like a memorandum which you make in a book. It helps you to remember how things really are. You remember the memorandum, but you must see the things themselves
in your mind’s eye. You know you’ve got a way to see with your …
