234 THE WORLD MACHINE 



and fifty times as bright ; and as the earth appears from Hesper 

 of just the same size as Hesper from the earth, it followed that 

 here was a planet a thousand times more vast in bulk than 

 either. Saturn at nearly twice the distance was almost as huge. 



Huge as they might be, yet all of them taken together 

 the colossal bulk of Jupiter and Saturn, the earth and all the 

 other known planets, and two more yet to be discovered, with 

 all their satellites, and five hundred asteroids besides all of 

 them combined would not make a thousandth part of the total 

 volume of the sun. It was as if in Vulcan's smithy the gods 

 had moulded one giant ball, and the planets were but bits and 

 small shot which had sputtered off as the glowing ingot was cast 

 and set in space. Little man on a little part of a little earth 

 a minor planet, a million of which might be tumbled into the 

 shell of the central sun was growing very small ; his wars, 

 the convulsions of a state, were losing consequence. Human 

 endeavour, human ambitions, could now scarce possess the 

 significance they had when men could regard the earth as the 

 central fact of the universe. 



Neither then, nor now, did the new knowledge exercise 

 greatly the thoughts or lives of men. Still, then as now there 

 were a few who reflected a little. It was the fashion of those 

 graceful days to say smart things when one could. " What," 

 said Maria Theresa to the philosopher Maupertuis, when she 

 had captured him from the armies of Frederick the Great, 

 against whom she was then at war " what does your philo- 

 sophy teach you to think of two princes who squabble over 

 little patches of the planet you have measured ? " 



" I have no right," was the sedate response of the hero of 

 Dr. Akakia, " to be more philosophic than kings." 



There can be little doubt that the New Revelation of the true 

 grandeur of the sun, the utter insignificance of our own planet, 

 did more to fix the Coppernican idea in the common mind than 

 all the arguments from Aristarchus to Galileo and long after. 

 So long as the sun could be thought of as small, or even as not 

 greatly larger than the earth, it was thinkable that it revolved 

 while the earth stood still. After the measures of Cassini, it 

 was unthinkable. No stretch of ignorant fancy could conceive 

 of a planet or the earth revolving round a minor satellite or 

 the moon, or, in varied parlance, a huge cannon-ball around a 

 single buckshot. 



