It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand
square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one
square mile, and that a million
square miles are almost the same as heaven.
The event of Tess Durbeyfield's return from the manor of her bogus kinsfolk was rumoured abroad, if rumour be not too large a word for a space of a
square mile. In the afternoon several young girls of Marlott, former schoolfellows and acquaintances of Tess, called to see her, arriving dressed in their best starched and ironed, as became visitors to a person who had made a transcendent conquest (as they supposed), and sat round the room looking at her with great curiosity.
It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a
square mile, as where I live.
found a population of ten to the
square mile, inconveniently
"I wouldn't trade a
square mile of this kind of country for the whole Sacramento Valley, with the river islands thrown in and Middle River for good measure.
"Bubbly Creek" is an arm of the Chicago River, and forms the southern boundary of the yards: all the drainage of the
square mile of packing houses empties into it, so that it is really a great open sewer a hundred or two feet wide.
Everybody knows that the great reversed triangle of land, with its base in the north and its apex in the south, which is called India, embraces fourteen hundred thousand
square miles, upon which is spread unequally a population of one hundred and eighty millions of souls.
"We know that the crust of the globe is 500 miles in thickness; then the inside diameter of Pellucidar must be 7,000 miles, and the superficial area 165,480,000
square miles. Three-fourths of this is land.
Chicago, in this year, had two hundred thou- sand telephones in use, in her two hundred
square miles of area.
The aspect of the surrounding country was entirely unfamiliar to me--I had no conception of precisely where I was upon the one hundred and twenty-four million
square miles of Pellucidar's vast land surface.
And through the charred and desolated area--perhaps twenty
square miles altogether--that encircled the Martian encamp- ment on Horsell Common, through charred and ruined villages among the green trees, through the blackened and smoking arcades that had been but a day ago pine spinneys, crawled the devoted scouts with the heliographs that were presently to warn the gunners of the Martian approach.
The island, which was of irregular outline and lay low upon the wide sea, had a total area, I suppose, of seven or eight
square miles. It was volcanic in origin, and was now fringed on three sides by coral reefs; some fumaroles to the northward, and a hot spring, were the only vestiges of the forces that had long since originated it.