“On the contrary, we are closer to it than ever. If the sun, which is thirty-eight millions of leagues from us, were to go around the earth every day, do you know how far it would have to go in a minute? More than 100,000 leagues. But this incomprehensible speed is nothing. The stars, as I have just told you, are so many suns, comparable to ours in volume and brilliancy; only they are much farther away, and that is what makes them appear so small. The nearest is about thirty thousand times as distant as the sun. Accordingly, in order to go around the earth in twenty-four hours, as it appears to do, it would have to move at the rate of thirty thousand times 100,000 leagues a minute. And how would it be with other stars a hundred times, a thousand times, a million times farther away—stars which, despite their distance, would all have to accomplish their journey around the earth always in exactly twenty-four hours? And remember, furthermore, the prodigious size of the sun. You want it, the giant, the colossus, beside which the earth is only a lump of clay, to circle at an impossible speed in infinite space, in order to give light and heat to our planet; you want thousands and thousands of other suns, quite as large and immensely farther off—in a word, the stars—to accomplish also, with velocities increasing according to the distance, a daily journey around this humble terrestrial globe! No! no! such an arrangement is contrary to reason; to allow it is to want to make the firebrands, the hearth, the whole house, turn around a little bird on a spit.” “Then it is the earth that turns, and we turn with it,” Claire again interposed. “In consequence of this movement the sun and stars seem to us to move in the opposite direction, like trees and houses when we are on the train. Since the sun seems to go around the earth from east to west in twenty-four hours, it is a proof that the earth turns on its axis from west to east in twenty-four hours.” “The earth turns in front of the sun in a manner to present its different parts successively to the rays of that body; it pirouettes on its axis like a top. Moreover, while it thus rotates in twenty-four hours, it revolves around the sun in the interval of a year. In playing with a top you find a good example of two analogous movements executed together. When the top turns on its point, not moving from the same place—in short, when it sleeps—it has only the movement of rotation. But in throwing it in a certain way, you know better than I that it circles on the ground while turning on its point. In that instance, it represents in a small way the double movement of the earth. Its rotation on its point represents the whirling motion of the earth on its axis; its course on the ground represents the earth’s revolution around the sun.