"I understand the whole thing now," he said, a light dawning on him. "I have been confusing weight with mass. The weight of bodies has nothing whatever to do with the question as to how far you can throw them, or the amount of damage they will do when thrown; it is their mass that decides this.

"Mass is the amount of matter a body contains, while weight is the force with which it is attracted to the earth. My mass here is just the same as it was on the earth, although my weight has entirely disappeared, and hence I can do as much damage with my hands and feet here as I could in my native land. The reason we can't throw a feather far on the earth, or smash a glass vase by throwing a feather at it, is not because the feather has little weight, but because it has almost no mass; that is to say, it contains very little matter."

These two experiments being satisfactorily terminated and explained, our hero now turned his attention to a third one which occurred to him, and that promised to afford no end of entertainment.