SUNBEAMS AND THEIR WORK. 31 
Only think, then, how many of these minute dots 
would be required to fill the whole of the inside of 
Fig, 4, if it were a globe ! 
One of the best ways to form an idea of the whole 
size of the sun is to imagine it to be hollow, like an 
air-ball, and then see how many earths it would take 
to fill it. You would hardly believe that it would take 
one million, three hundred and thirty-one thousand 
globes the size of our world squeezed together. 
Just think, if a huge giant could travel all over the 
universe and gather worlds, all as big as ours, and 
were to make first a heap of merely ten such worlds, 
how huge it would be ! Then he must have a hundred 
such heaps of ten to make a thousand worlds ; and 
then he must collect again a thousand times that 
thousand to make a million, and when he had stuffed 
them all into the sun-ball he would still have only 
filled three-quarters of it ! 
After hearing this you will not be astonished that 
such a monster should give out an enormous quantity 
of light and heat ; so enormous that it is almost im- 
possible to form any idea of it. Sir John Herschel 
has, indeed, tried to picture it for us. He found that 
a ball of lime with a flame of oxygen and hydrogen 
playing round it (such as we use in magic lanterns 
and call oxy-hydrogen light) becomes so violently 
hot that it gives the most brilliant artificial light we 
can get such that you cannot put your eye near 
it without injury. Yet if you wanted to have a light 
as strong as that of our sun, it would not be enough 
to make such a lime-ball as big as the sun is. No, 
you must make it as big as 146 suns, or more than 
