Page:Clement Fezandié - Through the Earth.djvu/184

164 a short distance, while a good heavy base-ball could be thrown out of sight. The same thing ought to be true here in the car, because here all objects are stuffed with wadding instead of with weight, so to speak; yet my knife flies around here better than it would up there. I can't understand it at all!"

After a moment's pause, our hero continued:

"If the knife had even a small amount of weight, I could understand why it is possible to throw it around; but I know that objects in the car have no weight at all, because I can stay up in midair if I want to, and this would be impossible if I had weight. Besides, among the instruments on the wall there is a spring balance with a pound weight in the pan. At the present moment the needle in the balance points to zero. This shows that the pound weight does n't pull on the spring at all, or, in other words, the same piece of iron which on the earth would weigh a pound has no longer any weight. Just for the fun of it, I weighed myself on the balance, too, but even I did n't weigh a single ounce. Consequently it's certain that bodies in the car have now no weight, and that makes it hard to understand why that knife flew around so nicely."