Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/23

Rh we reduce the sun and planets to a more conceivable smaller scale.

If then we represent our Earth as a little ball of one inch diameter, the sun would be a big globe nine feet across and 323 yards away, that is about a fifth of a mile, four or five minutes' walking. The moon would be a small pea two feet and a half from the world. Between earth and sun there would be the two inner planets, Mercury and Venus, at distances of one hundred and twenty-five and two hundred and fifty yards from the sun. All round and about these bodies there would be emptiness until you came to Mars, a hundred and seventy-five feet beyond the earth, Jupiter nearly a mile away, a foot in diameter, Saturn, a little smaller two miles off, Uranus four miles off and Neptune six miles off. Then nothingness and