When you and I are together you often ask me questions about many things and I try to answer them.

Now that you are at Mussoorie and I am in Allahabad we cannot have these talks.

I am therefore going to write to you from time to time short accounts of the story of our earth and the many countries, great and small, into which it is divided.

You have read a little about English history and Indian history.

But England is only a little island and India, through a big country, is only a small part of the earth’s surface.

If we want to know something about the story of this world of ours we must think of all the countries and all the peoples that have inhabited it, and not merely of one little country where we may have been born.

I am afraid I can only tell you very little in these letters of mine.

But that little, I hope, will interest you and make you think of the world as a whole, and of other peoples in it as our brothers and sisters.

When you grow up you will read about the story of the earth and her peoples in fat books and you will find it more interesting than any other story or novel that you may have read.

You know of course that our earth is very, very old-millions and millions of years old.

And for a long long time there were no men or women living in it.

Before the men came there were only animals, and before the animals there was a time when no kind of life existed on the earth.

মানুষেরা আসার আগে এখানে কেবলমাত্র জীবজন্তুরা থাকত এবং জীবজন্তুদের আগে এমন এক সময় ছিল যখন পৃথিবীতে কোনও প্রকার জীবন ছিল না।

But scientists and those who have studied and thought a great deal about these matters tell us that there was a time when the earth was too hot for any living being to live on it.

And if we read their books and study the rocks and the fossils (the remains of old animals) we can ourselves see that this must have been so.