Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 February 1877 — The Distance of the Sun. [ARTICLE]

The Distance of the Sun.

If some celestial railway could be imagined, the journey tp the sun, ewn if our trains ran sixty miles an hour, day and night, and without a stop, would require over 175 year*. Sensation, evei, would not travel so far in a human Hyetime. To borrow the curious illustration of Prof. Mendenhall, if we oouta imagine an infant with an arm lope enough to enable him to ! touch' • the tfiw and burn himself, > he wottld die' 1 of old age before the pain could Teach him. According to thd tttjjbriihents Of Helmholtz and others,: a nervous shock is communicated only at the rate of about 100 feet per second, <ir 1,61)7 mile* a day, and would need more than'ls6 yekm to make the journby*. • Bound would do n in about fourteen yriars if it could be tratek mitted through celtetisl space, and a cmnon "ball in sfoout hiifo, fflt *fere to move uniformly with the same sp&id Tis When it left the ffi«fßnsrffie ghb. Ts the fluence of his attraction, she would reach the eentral flre in about four month*. L have said if'she could be stopped, but such is the compass of her orbit that, to make its circuit in a year she has t» move nearly nineteen miles a second, or more than fifty times faster than the swiftest rifle ball; and; in moving twenty miles she deviates from perfect straightness by leas than of £ inch. And yet, over all the circumference of tills tremendous orbit, the sun exercises hia dominion, and eVeiy pulsation df his surface receives its response from the subject earth.--Pruf U> A. Finm?, -til Popufor Seimee Monthly. i - >.u ,> »‘til'iq»a»dl, During the year just closed, nearly forty lives were lost in tbe Pennsylvania « oil regions through careless handling of nitroglycerine. .