Page:Maury's New Elements of Geography, 1907.djvu/13

Rh The earth does not seem round to us. The fields and the village, or the city where we live, may be flat. Some places look as flat as a floor. But still the earth is round.

If we could stand off and look at the earth as we look at the orange, then we should see that it is round. But we cannot get far enough from the earth to do this; we can see only a very small part of it at one time. This is the reason that it seems flat to us.



2. Size of the Earth.—Suppose a carrier dove should fly round the earth. A swift carrier dove can fly 100 miles an hour. If it was to fly at that rate, without ever stopping, it would be more than ten days in going round the earth.

What a big ball the earth must be! We know about how much a mile is. The distance round the earth is 25,000 miles. This distance is called the circumference of the earth. The distance through the earth is about 8,000 miles. This distance is called the diameter of the earth.

1. Land.—The outside of the earth is called its surface. One part of the surface is solid, or hard. This is called the land. We live on the land, and build our houses and towns and cities upon it. Trees and other plants grow on the land, and animals live on it.

2. Water.—But there is a large part of the surface of the earth which is water. Most of us have seen a pond, and we all know what a pond is. Now suppose a pond were made ever so large, hundreds and thousands of miles across, instead of a few yards. There is a pond as large as that. It is called the sea.

We can see in the picture above that the water surface is very much larger than the land surface. There is nearly three times as much water as land.