Chapter Six

Our Place on Earth


The next time our wise man from the east was asked to "say a few
words and make his own topic," he spoke, perhaps, as follows:

"How large do you think the earth is? You answer promptly, 7,912
miles in diameter. You are as far out of the way as you were in
supposing that our sun could be a centre of gravity of a lot of
planets revolving around it and around Alcyone without being a
globe of ether. Now that it has been mentioned, you see very
clearly for yourself that it must be a solar globe of ether. It
follows from one of your physical axioms. When I tell you why
the earth is and must be about fifty thousand miles in diameter,
you will see that it must be so, and that you knew it all the
time, but never stopped to formulate your knowledge. You have
had the knowledge for three centuries without applying it.

"It was in 1609 that your greatest astronomer, John Kepler,
announced as one of three harmonic laws by which the universe was
governed, that the squares of the times of the planets were
proportional to the cubes of their distances from the sun; and
that this law was true in physics and everywhere. No one of your
scientists has had the wisdom to study out what it meant, and for