52 THE SUN. 



the ancient Greek philosophers there was a lively dispute 

 as to the real size of the sun. One maintained that it 

 was " precisely as large as it looks to be," a thoroughly 

 Greek way of getting out of a difficulty. All the best 

 thinkers among them, however, clearly saw that it must 

 be a very large body. One of them (Anaxagoras) went 

 the length of saying that it might be as large as all Greece, 

 for which he got laughed at. But he was outbid by 

 Anaximander, who said it was twenty-eight times as large 

 the earth. What would Anaximander or the scoffer of 

 Anaxagoras have said, could he have known what we now 

 know, that, seen from the same distance as the sun, the 

 territory of Greece would have been absolutely invisible; 

 and that even the whole earth, if laid upon it, would not 

 cover more than one thirteen-thousandth part of its ap- 

 parent surface, less in proportion, that is to say, than a 

 single letter in the broad expanse of type which meets 

 the reader's eye when a closely-printed volume with a 

 large page and small type lies open before him.* 



(6.) My object in this notice is not to put before my 

 audience, except in one single instance, any connected 

 chain of reasoning and deduction ; or to show how, from 

 the principles of abstract science combined with observa- 

 tion, the results I have to state have been obtained. 

 This would lead me a great deal too far, and would re- 

 quire not one but a whole series of such lectures. What I 



* The original type and page of "Good Words" were here re- 

 ferred to, in which this lecture first appeared in print : each page of 

 which contains about 6000 letters. The pages which now lie open 

 before the eye of the reader contain, together, only about 2600. 



