Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II CHARTING THE UNIVERSE TO us its inhabitants our earth seems a very big place. The man who has been round the world has taken a journey that is to be remembered for a life time. The fastest express train requires four days to cross our big continent. The fastest ship takes five days to cross the narrowest part of the Atlantic. Our modern air ships fly a mile a minute?sixty miles an hour. Suppose an airship were so perfected that it could maintain its flight uninterruptedly day after day without stopping for repairs or fuel. Such a flying machine, going a mile a minute, would carry its passengers clear around the world at the equator in less than seventeen days. That would be a feat worth talking about,?the circumnavigation of our big world in little more than half a month. But now suppose that the airmen, flying thus at uniform speed of a mile a minute, could start straight up into the air and could continue in a bee line on a Jules Verne voyage off into space. How long would it take him, think you, to get to our neighbor Mars? Why, a matter of ninety odd years. That would be a tiresome voyage,?not to speakof the absence of air and the frigidity of empty space. Yet it would constitute only the beginning of an exploratory tour across the solar system. If our phantom voyager were disposed to see something more of the world-system of which the earth and Mars are minor members, he might pass right on for some centuries through the region of the swarming minor planets, called asteroids or planetoids, and only after 700 years of flying would he come to Jupiter,?something really worth while in the way of planets, bulking 1300 times bigger than the earth. Another period of 760 years would be required to cross the gap between Jupiter and Saturn. The journey from Sa…