Infinitesimal Aspect of Things Terrestrial.

Wairarapa Standard, Volume XIX, Issue 1830, 10 May 1886, Page 3

Infinitesimal Aspect of Things Terrestrial.

We clip the following from an Australian paper :

Sik, —When we hear of Vanderbilt dyino worth £50,000 000 ; the Nevada Silver King, twice as much ; Mr Mercer and his nice sister, coming m fur a c > 1 £11x1,000,000 sterling ; Lieut.-C'ol. Sir Robert Luyd-Lindsay. extra Equerry to the i’nnce of Waits, having recently been left £20,000,000 cash by his father in-law ; the r -zar of Knssia worth 1 1,800,000 a year; the Duke of Westminster, with an annual income of upwards of £1,000,000 ; Lucu lus’ and Nero s tabmous wealth; when we read of our 10,ooohorse power mviacib e ironclads, of Jdismark's dreaded arrogance, and of a despotic monanh s dignity, compared to the wot idly posit.on of a 'superannuated du-w----mau s drunken assistant in reduced circumstances" (Dickens), a reflective mind is led to conjecture the vast distinctions this great world must embrace, by sycophants worshipped. But when, on the other hand, we learn that the relative size of the great earth, com pared with even one of the most insignificant of the fixed stars— Sinus—is such that a proportionately sized inhabitant of this little twinkling star, Sirius, if possessed of oar {five senses, would delicately have to place the biggest city of this earth carefully on a piece of white paper on the table in his study, wiih a glass shade over it, to prevent the stnpid servant gin from sweeping it away into the dust bin |by mistake, and by his looking ,at it through a very powerfu mi croseOpe, could then barely dectect the exi» teace of S minute opaque object on the paper —1 say when we pooy mortals scientifically know this comparison to be a ridiculous fact, bow small the world would relatively be ana consequently bow painfully small must appear Eie infinitesimal diminutiveness of the greatest of our swells. In fact, to a Sinus masher, thjy form of .animal animal-

cule would simply be imperceptibly unrecog nizable.

So much for this interesting, though 'Humiliating contemplation. Now for the proof Sinus is 4,000 times arger than the sun. The sun is 1,300,000 times the bulk of the earth. JThe earth is 7 925 miles in diameter, say in round figures 8.000 miles, which, reduced to inches would give 520,000,000 inches, and Sirius being only five thousand two hundred million times larger than the earth, and as spheres being to each other as the cubic of their diameters, it fol ows that the diameter of,the earth is 1,737 times times less than that of Sirius were to be contracted to the size of the earth, this earth would have to oe contracted to a ball of the dimension. Then so much for this "little dim-dis-covered spot, the earth," (as Henry Kirke White remarks in his famous poem on Time), with all its fleeting pomp and invidiousness.