the boy seated with one knee raised, on a circular plinth bearing the line "I'll put a girdle around the earth in forty minutes"

In Scene II of Shakespeare’s “The Midsummer Night’s Dream”, Oberon sends Puck to fetch a flower with magical properties:

Oberon:

Fetch me that flower; the herb I shew’d thee once:
The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Fetch me this herb; and be thou here again
Ere the leviathan can swim a league

Puck:

I’ll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes.