SUNBEAMS AND THEIR WORK. 29 
reach him as he sits in the sky, and yet we know 
roughly that he is more than ninety-one millions of 
miles distant from our earth. 
These figures are so enormous that you cannot 
really grasp them. But imagine yourself in an express 
train, travelling at the tremendous rate of sixty miles 
an hour and never stopping. At that rate, if you 
wished to arrive at the sun to-day you would have 
been obliged to start 171 years ago. That is, you 
must have set off in the early part of the reign of 
Queen Anne, and you must have gone on, never, never 
resting, through the reigns of George I., George II., 
and the long reign of George III., then through those 
of George IV., William IV., and Victoria, whirling on 
day and night at express speed, and at last, to-day, 
you would have reached the sun ! 
And when you arrived there, how large do you 
think you would find him to be ? Anaxagoras, a 
learned Greek, was laughed at by all his fellow Greeks 
because he said that the sun was as large as the 
Peloponnesus, that is about the size of Middlesex. 
How astonished they would have been if they could 
have known that not only is he bigger than the whole 
of Greece, but more than a million times bigger than 
the whole world ! 
Our world itself is a very large place, so large that 
our own country looks only like a tiny speck upon it, and 
an express train would take nearly a month to travel 
round it Yet even our whole globe is nothing in size 
compared to the sun, for it only measures 8000 miles 
across, while the sun measures more than 852,000. 
Imagine for a moment that you could cut the sun and 
