SUNBEAMS AND THEIR WORK. 29 
learn what the sun is, and how he sends us his beams. 
How far away from us do you think he is ? On a fine 
summer's day when we can see him clearly, it looks as 
if we had only to get into a balloon and reach him as 
he sits in the sky, and yet we know that he is more 
than ninety-two 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 more than one hundred and 
seventy-five years ago. That is, you must have set 
off in the early part of the reign of Queen Anne, long 
before the revolution by which America ceased to be 
an English colony and became a free nation ; all 
through the days of Washington and the long line of 
presidents; through the war of 1812; that with Mex- 
ico, and the late war with Spain, up to the present 
day 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 his fellow Greeks 
because he said that the sun was as large as the Pelo- 
ponnesus that is, about the size of a county of the 
state in which you live. 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 large place, so large that your 
