The path of the earth through space is spiral, so that it is all the time advancing into new regions along with the sun. She is on a boundless voyage of discovery, and her human crew are born and die in widely separated tracts of space. Think of the distance over which the travels of the sun have borne the earth only since the beginning of human history! Six thousand years ago the earth and sun were about a million millions of miles further from the stars in Hercules than they are today. Columbus and his contemporaries lived when the earth was in a region of the universe more than sixty billion of miles from the place where it is now, so that since his time the whole human race has been making a voyage through space, in comparison with which his longest voyage was as the footstep of a fly.
Thus the great events in the history of the world may be said to have occurred in different parts of the universe.

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