62 THE SUN. 



upright there, than he could here on earth with twenty- 

 nine men on his shoulders. He would be squeezed as 

 flat as a pancake by his own weight. 



(20.) Giant Size and Giant Strength are ugly qualities 

 without beneficence. But the sun is the almoner of the 

 Almighty, the delegated dispenser to us of light and 

 warmth, as well as the centre of attraction ; and as such, 

 the immediate source of all our comforts, and indeed 

 of the very possibility of our existence on earth. Even 

 the very coals which we burn, owe their origin to the 

 sun's influence, being all of vegetable materials, the re- 

 mains of vast forests which have been buried and pre- 

 served in that form for the use of man, millions of ages 

 before he was placed on the earth ; and which, but for 

 the solar light and heat, would have had no existence.* 

 Indeed, the theory of heat which is now gaining ground 

 would almost go to prove that it is the actual identical 

 heat which the sun put into the coal, while in the form 

 of living vegetation, that comes out again when it is 

 burnt as coal in our grates and furnaces ; so that, after 

 all, Swift's idea of extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, 

 which he attributes to his Laputan philosophers, may 

 not be so very absurd, f 



* See the treatise on Astronomy, by the author of this paper, in 

 "Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia," published in 1833. Stevenson 

 (the celebrated engineer) has more recently drawn attention to this 

 fact. 



f Not more so at least than some of his other Laputan speculations ; 

 such as calcining ice into gunpowder : or moving vast locomotive 

 masses by magnetism, both which feats have, in a somewhat altered 

 form of expression, been accomplished (as in the explosion of potas- 

 sium when laid on ice, and the movement of a ship by electro-mag- 



