Good evening and welcome to boring books for bedtime. I hope tonight's installment provides

all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep for once. So lie back,

adjust your volume. Take a nice deep breath and off we go.

This evening we're reading a work by a man better known for speculative fiction.

It's a short history of the world by H.G. Wells, published by Macmillan

Company, New York, 1922. Let's begin. A short history of the world, Chapter 1, the World in Space.

The story of our world is a story that is still very imperfectly known.

A couple of hundred years ago, men possessed the history of little more than the last 3,000 years.

What happened before that time was a matter of legend and speculation. Over a large part of the

civilized world it was believed and taught that the world had been created

suddenly in 4,000 BC, though authorities differed as to whether this had occurred in the spring

or autumn of that year.

This fantastically precise misconception was based upon a two literal interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and upon rather arbitrary theological assumptions connected therewith.

Such ideas have long since been abandoned by religious teachers, and it is universally recognized

that the universe in which we live has to all appearances

existed for an enormous period of time and possibly for endless time.

Of course, there may be deception in these appearances,

as a room may be made to seem endless by putting mirrors

facing each other at either end, but that the universe in which we live has existed

only for six or seven thousand years may be regarded as an altogether exploded idea.

The Earth, as everybody knows nowadays, is a spheroid, a sphere slightly compressed, orange fashion with a diameter of nearly 8,000 miles.

Its spherical shape has been known at least to a limited number of intelligent people for nearly 2,500 years. But before that time, it was supposed to be flat, and various ideas which now seem fantastic were entertained about its relations to the sky and the stars and planets.

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