Excerpt from The Earth: A Descriptive History of the Phenomena of the Life of the Globe The earth on which we dwell is one of the lowest in rank among the heavenly bodies. If an astronomer in some other planet were exploring the immensity of space, our earth, owing to its small size might readily elude his intelligent view. A me1e satellite 'of the sun, the volume of which is times greater, the earth 1s but a point as compared with the immense tract of ether traversed by the planets in their courses round their central globe. The sun itself is only a spark, which seems lost amid the eighteen millions of stars which Herschel's telescope dis cerned in the Milky Way; the latter, an 1mmense agglomeration of suns and planets, which looks to us like a broad streak of light round the whole universe, is in reality nothing but a nebula; that is, a cloud of stars re sembling a mist, which would be as nothing in infinite space. Beyond our own sky, other skies stretch far away into infinity, and others beyond these, so that light, notwithstanding its prodigious rapidity, takes eterni ties to cross them. How small the earth seems in this fathomless abyss of stars! Individually, it may seem immense to us; all too vast for our littleness, we have not yet succeeded in investigating the whole of its sur face; but, as compared with the whole sidereal cosmos, it is less than a grain of sand by the side of a mass of mountains, or an atmospheric par ticle compared with aerial space. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.