To reach the thought of one million, you must picture _one thousand times one thousand_. Our earth is about twenty-five thousand miles round. If you were to start from the mouth of the River Amazon, in South America, and journey straight round the whole earth on the equator, till you came back to the same point, you would have traveled about twenty-five thousand miles. But that would be a long way off from a million miles. You would have gone only once round the earth. Now a cord one million miles in length could be wrapped, not once only, but _forty times_, round and round the earth. And when you have managed to reach up to the thought of one million miles, you have then to remember that the sun’s distance is ninety-three times as much again. So, to picture clearly to ourselves the actual meaning of “ninety-three millions of miles” is not so easy. Suppose it were possible to lay a railroad from here to the sun. If you could journey thither in a perfectly straight line, at the rate of thirty miles an hour, never pausing for one single minute, night or day, you would reach the sun in about three hundred and forty-six years. Thirty miles an hour is a slow train. Suppose we double the speed, and make it an express train, rushing along at the pace of sixty miles an hour. Then you might hope to reach the end of your journey in one hundred and seventy-three years. If you had quitted this earth early in the eighteenth century, never stopping on your way, you would be, just about now, near the end of the nineteenth, arriving at the sun. So much for the sun’s distance from us. Now as to his size. I have already mentioned that our earth’s diameter--that is, her _through measure_, as, for instance, the line drawn straight from England through her center to New Zealand--is about eight thousand miles. This sounds a good deal. But what do you think of the diameter of the sun being no less than _eight hundred and fifty-eight thousand miles_? The one is eight thousand miles, the other over eight hundred thousand! Suppose you had a long slender pole which would pass through the middle of the earth, one end just showing at the North Pole and the other at the South Pole. You would need more than a hundred and eight of such poles, all joined together, to show the diameter of the sun. The sun seems not to be made of nearly such heavy materials as the earth. He is what astronomers call less “dense,” less close and compact in his make, just as wood is less dense and heavy than iron. Still, his size is so enormous, that if you could have a pair of gigantic scales, and put the sun into one scale and the earth with every one of her brother and sister planets into the other, the sun’s side would go down like lightning. He would be found to weigh seven hundred and fifty times as much as all the rest put together. And, it would take more than twelve hundred thousand little earths like ours, rolled into one huge ball, to make a globe as large as the sun.