eginning of the Christian era is equal to
one-billionth the weight of the sun. The planets are fashioned in the
same way. Jupiter you see is made up of little, squirming animal-like
units; that is because Jupiter occupies the same amount of space that
would be filled by the descendants of a single pair of Australian
rabbits in five hundred years, if left unchecked. Observe the orbit of
the earth. It is marked out in twopenny postage stamps, for
statisticians assure us that the path of the earth around the sun is
equivalent in length to all the postage stamps consumed since the
beginning of the nineteenth century, if laid end to end. In the same way
the seven rings of Saturn are made up of copper pennies, obtained by
reducing the world's annual output of gold to coins of that
denomination."

We passed into a cosy little alcove lined to the ceiling with books.
There seemed nothing out of the ordinary about them at first sight, but
my host soon undeceived me. "These," he said, "are the books that might
have been written in the last hundred years, if the time and energy that
are spent on smoking, drinking, whist, bridge, and out-door games were
devoted to the cultivation of literature. Here, for instance, are three
plays quite as good as 'Hamlet,' written by two million men named Smith,
who gave up the use of tobacco. Here is a philosophical poem which shows
on every page an inspiration higher than Goethe ever attained; it
embodies the concentrated ideas produced by twenty-five thousand former
golf players, thinking half an hour a day for three days in the week.
Here is a poetic version of the future life which completely outclasses
the 'Divina Commedia.' It is compounded out of the experiences of
forty-three thousand moderate drinkers who became total abstainers,
seventy disbanded croquet associations, and 1,125 obsolete euchre clubs.

"Perhaps," concluded Cooper, "you should see this before you go," and he
pointed to a single shelf of books with a curious mechanical arrangement
at one side. "This shelf," he said, "is exactly five feet long. This
little electric motor at the side is so constructed that it gets into
motion every day for twenty minutes, and stops. By a system of cogs and
levers the motor propels a fine steel needle straight through the five
feet of books. A glance at this brass dial shows at once how far the
needle point has reached. At the present moment, for instance, it is
halfway through the front cover