miles, the weight, or rather the mass, of the earth is no less than thirteen octillion pounds!
13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds!
It is difficult to form any conception of this stupendous figure, but some idea of it will be obtained when we state that the earth weighed so much more than our hero that, since it would take a second for the knife to fall sixteen feet on the earth, it would take billions upon billions of years for it to fall even one ten thousandth part of an inch nearer to William!
To say that our hero was amazed at the result even of his inaccurate calculations would be to put the matter mildly. Like every other person who has had a smattering of physics, he was familiar with the fact that the attraction of bodies is proportional to their masses; but few persons stop to reflect how infinitesimal the attraction of a man really is in comparison to the attraction of the earth itself.
William, it must be confessed, was highly disappointed at this turn of affairs, for it would have been most amusing to swim around the car, with all the loose objects in it, solids as well as liquids, following around after him as a nail follows a magnet.
