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they would sink into insignificance, and the earth would appear
as a great rounded globe or sphere not varying in its general
shape from the other planets.
There is ample proof that the surface of the earth is curved.
I. Watch ships as they sail seaward. Do they not pass over a curved
surface as their hulls, then their sails, and lastly their topmasts, disappear f
rom
view ?
2. Stand at the foot of a hill overlooking a plain and note the boundary
line or limit of vision. Now climb to the summit and note the increased
range of vision. Were the earth flat, this would not occur.
3. Observe the curved margin of the earth's shadow during an eclipse of
the moon.
The sun, earth, and moon being now in the same straight line, the shadow
of the earth extends in the form of an elongated cone far beyond the orbit of
the moon. That body, in the course of its movement, cuts this shadow which
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obscures its face. While the margin of the shadow is ill defined, it is, nevertheless, sufficient to show the general curvature of the surface.
That the earth is of a spherical shape is also shown
1. By voyages and journeys " round the world."'
2. By the measurement of arcs of great circles.
3. By the fact that the horizon when viewed from a high point rising above
a level plain, as from a tower or the summit of a hill, is always circular, a
property belonging only to spherical bodies.
The Earth an Oblate Spheroid.
The particles of a rotating
body tend to fly off in straight lines. This tendency is called
centrifugal force.
Gravitation tends to
make a mass spherical. These two
forces combined
have caused the
earth, which is somewhat plastic and
elastic, to assume a
slightly flattened
spherical form called
an oblate spheroid.
Its longest diameter
is nearly 7927 miles
and its shortest diameter nearly 7900
miles. Its greatest
circumference is
about 24,900 miles,
its smallest circumference about 24,860
miles, and the area of
its surface 197 millions of square miles.
The oblateness of the earth is shown by the fact that although the weight
of a body on its surface is nearly constant, it is slightly greater in high
latitudes.