A Little Astronomy and Geology 



may seem great but when it Is compared to the distances of 

 some of the other planets from the sun, It fades Into Insig- 

 nificance. Uranus Is so far removed from the sun that It 

 takes it eighty-four of our years to travel around the sun 

 while Neptune is approximately three thousand million miles 

 from the sun and It requires one hundred and sixty-five of 

 our years for it to complete its revolution around the sun. 

 As great as these distances may seem to us, yet they fade 

 Into nothingness when compared to the distances of the 

 stars. 



The nearest visible star is twenty-five trillion miles away 

 while others are so far away that it takes light from these 

 traveling 186,000 miles a second, more than a million years, 

 to reach the earth. And lo ! this is just the beginning of 

 our understanding, for space Is limitless and time is eternal. 

 At the present stage of development our finite minds fail us 

 in their comprehension, and we cannot, as yet, understand 

 either space or eternity. 



There are other theories concerning the manner in 

 which our earth and the planets got away from the sun, got 

 out Into space and there got into balance in the solar system 

 but scientists all agree as to their origin from the mother 

 sun. But let us take the earth as we find it and apply the 

 accumulated knowledge of the ages in trying to discover 

 some of the truth It reveals. 



We know that the earth is a sphere approximately 8,000 

 miles In its diameter, rotating once each day on its axis and 

 traveling in Its orbit through space at the rate of 65,000 

 miles each hour; that it Is held In its path by the universal 



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