So you see it becomes very interesting for us to 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 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 today 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, today, 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 Peloponne-sus, 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