The ancient Greeks worshipped the sun, and condemned
to death one of their greatest philosophers, named
Anaxagoras, because he denied that it was a god.
We can scarcely wonder at this when we see what the
sun does for our world; but we know that it is a huge
globe made of gases and fiery matter and not a god.
We are grateful for the sun instead of to him, and
surely we shall look at him with new interest, now
that we can picture his tiny messengers, the sunbeams,
flitting over all space, falling upon our earth, giving
us light to see with, and beautiful colours to enjoy,
warming the air and the earth, making the refreshing
rain, and, in a word, filling the world with life
and gladness.
LECTURE III The Aerial Ocean in Which We Live
Did you ever sit on the bank of a river in some quiet
spot where the water was deep and clear, and watch
the fishes swimming lazily along? When I was
a child this was one of my favourite occupations in
the summertime on the banks of the Thames, and there
was one question which often puzzled me greatly, as
I watched the minnows and gudgeon gliding along through
the water. Why should fishes live in something
and be often buffeted about by waves and currents,
while I and others lived on the top of the earth and
not in anything? I do not remember ever asking
anyone about this; and if I had, in those days people
did not pay much attention to children’s questions,
and probably nobody would have told me, what I now
tell you, that we do live in something quite as real
and often quite as rough and stormy as the water in
which the fishes swim. The something in which
we live is air, and the reason that we do not perceive
it, is that we are in it, and that it is a gas, and
invisible to us; while we are above the water in which
the fishes live, and it is a liquid which our eyes
can perceive.
But let us suppose for a moment that a being, whose
eyes were so made that he could see gases as we see
liquids, was looking down from a distance upon our
earth. He would see an ocean of air, or aerial
ocean, all round the globe, with birds floating about
in it, and people walking along the bottom, just as
we see fish gliding along the bottom of a river.
It is true, he would never see even the birds come
near to the surface, for the highest-flying bird,
the condor, never soars more than five miles from
the ground, and our atmosphere, as we shall see, is
at least 100 miles high. So he would call us
all deep-air creatures, just as we talk of deep-sea
animals; and if we can imagine that he fished in this
air-ocean, and could pull one of us out of it into
space, he would find that we should gasp and die just
as fishes do when pulled out of the water.
