Читать книгу Star-land: Being Talks With Young People About the Wonders of the Heavens онлайн

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Our earth is at this moment spinning round at a speed so great that London moves many hundreds of miles every hour. A town near the equator would gallop round at a pace of more than a thousand miles an hour—quicker, in fact, than a rifle-bullet. Don’t you think that we ought to perceive that we are being whirled about in this terrific fashion? We know that when we are flying along in a railway train, we feel the jolting and we hear the noise, and we feel the blast of air if we put our heads out of window, and we see the trees as they appear to rush past. All these things tell us that we are in rapid motion. But suppose these sensations were absent. Imagine a line so perfectly laid that no jolts are perceptible, and that no racket is heard; draw down the blinds so that nothing can be seen, how then are we to know that we are moving? Indeed, your grandfathers used to be able to enjoy such a tranquil locomotion. I remember seeing in my childhood the fly-boats, as they were called, on the Royal Canal, wherein passengers were conveyed from Dublin to the West of Ireland, before the railway was made. The fly-boat was a sort of Noah’s ark in appearance, drawn by a horse cantering along the towing-path. In the cabin of such a vessel, where there was not the slightest motion of rolling or pitching—nothing but noiseless gliding along the canal—no one would be conscious of motion, so long as he did not look through the cabin windows. No one was ever seasick in a fly-boat; it was the perfection of travelling for those who loved ease and quiet.