CHAPTER IX 

 THE FLYING EARTH: THE FIXITY OF THE SUN 



FROM out the wrecks of time not much of the learning of the 

 ancients has been saved. Goth and Hun, priestly zealots and 

 fanatical conquerors, left little, and on what they left the 

 worms have fed. The library in Alexandria was, all things 

 considered, certainly the most wonderful gathering of books 

 which ever existed 700,000 volumes, copied by hand. It 

 would represent a hundred times the value of the great libraries 

 now existing. We do not know that a single volume of it 

 remains. From" the torch of Caesar's legions, and the wild rabble 

 of Christians under Theophilus who sacked and burned it four 

 hundred years after, not much was spared to give body to the 

 myth of the conquering Omar who came four centuries later still. 



So of the works of Aristarchus there has come down only 

 the thin volume wherein he sets forth the measures of the sun 

 and moon. It is to another small volume, four lines at that, 

 that we owe our knowledge of what views he held of the world 

 he had thus surveyed. This was that strange Arenarius, or 

 " sand-reckoner," wherein Archimedes attempts to show how 

 it is possible to express in figures the number of grains of sand 

 that the whole celestial sphere might hold were it rilled full. 

 It is the play of an intellectual prestidigitateur, a juggler who 

 takes numbers for balls to toss and the universe for his stage. 

 He tells us that he will not take for the radius of the stellar 

 sphere merely the distance of the sun from the earth, " as most 

 of the astronomers do " ; he will show that he may cope even 

 with the ideas of Aristarchus. And so we chance to know 

 what this celebrated Aristarchus taught that the distance of 

 the stars is incommensurable to men. 



It is easy to think that these ideas of the ancients were 

 merely fancies ; that they thought over things a little, then 

 hazarded a guess ; and guessing much and often they might 



