OOD'S GIFT OF SUNLIGHT 311 



Imby; but seventeen days go by very quickly, they 

 are even fewer than the days between Thanksgiving 

 and Christmas. ^ ^ 



To this immense globe, the sun, that is so far away, 

 we owe all cm- light and heat. "How can the light 

 and heat reach us when they come so great a dis- 

 tance?" you ask. 



Ah! that we do not know, -it is still a mystery. It 

 IS one of God's laws that we have not yet discovered. 

 Men have a way of explaining it by saying that it 

 comes on waves of ether, but what ether is no one 

 can tell. But you do know that some of the sun's 

 heat does get here, if you remember one of those hot 

 days m summer when the sun would have blistered 

 your skm if you had remained out in it long. 



Yet they tell us — those searchers of the sky — 

 that "only about one-hundred-millionth part of the 

 sun's heat is caught by all the planets together"- 

 and there are seven other planets besides our world' 

 Now that is something that our minds cannot grasp 

 at all! Try to picture to yourself a huge bonfire in 

 an open field, with eight children scattered here and 

 there withm a circle five miles across. How much 

 of the heat of the bonfire would each of you children 

 receive? The one nearest the fire would feel its heat 

 the most. The child who was one-fifth of a mile 

 away would seem to get but little of its heat yet 

 that child would represent the earth's distance from 

 the sun. It is quite easy to understand, then, that 

 the heat which comes from the sun is very much 

 greater than the heat which comes from any fire 

 that we could possibly make. 



