on the air below and keeps the atoms closely packed together.
And in this case the atoms cannot force back the air above them
as they did the cork in the pop-gun; they are obliged to submit
to be pressed together.

Even a short distance from the earth, however, at the top of a
high mountain, the air becomes lighter, because it has less
weight of atmosphere above it, and people who go up in balloons
often have great difficulty in breathing, because the air is so
thin and light. In 1804 a Frenchman, named Gay-Lussac, went up
four miles and a half in a balloon, and brought down some air;
and he found that it was much less heavy than the same quantity
of air taken close down to the earth, showing that it was much
thinner, or rarer, as it is called;* and when, in 1862, Mr.
Glaisher and Mr. Coxwell went up five miles and a half, Mr.
Glaisher's veins began to swell, and his head grew dizzy, and he
fainted. The air was too thin for him to breathe enough in at a
time, and it did not press heavily enough on the drums of his
ears and the veins of his body. He would have died if Mr.
Coxwell had not quickly let off some of the gas in the balloon,
so that it sank down into denser air. (*100 cubic inches near the
earth weighed 31 grains, while the same quantity taken at four
and a half miles up in the air weighed only 12 grains, or two-
fifths of the weight.)

And now comes another very interesting question. If the air gets
less and less dense as it is farther from the earth, where does
it stop altogether? We cannot go up to find out, because we
should die long before we reached the limit; and for a long time
we had to guess about how high the atmosphere probably was, and