MR. SIXTH REDISCOVERED 185 



bright inner, and a " crape " or slate - coloured ring 

 nearer still to the planet. Did Herschel not see and 

 figure all three, only failing to observe the interval 

 between the very bright and the " crape " ring ? We 

 can only express our surprise if one so quick of eye, 

 and so careful to observe, ascribed to the bright ring 

 in 1794, what he did not see or delineate on it in 1792, 

 if the " crape " existed then as it exists now. 



Fifty years after, Sir John Herschel, when at the 

 Cape of Good Hope, made a careful search for the two 

 moons discovered by his illustrious father. He had 

 all but given it up in despair when, looking for the 

 other five " with the 20-feet reflector," which he took 

 with him to South Africa, " and a polished new mirror, 

 there stood Mr. Sixth S . . . Next night it was kept in 

 view long enough for Saturn to have left it behind by 

 its own motion, had it been a star. ... So this is 

 at last a thing made out," he writes. "As for No. 

 Seven, I have no hope of ever seeing it." 



Since Herschel's time the minds of men have become 

 familiar with strings of meteorites, millions of miles in 

 length, through which our earth plunges in its yearly 

 journey round the sun. If they form, or come in time 

 to form, a continuous ring about the sun, one hundred 

 thousand miles in breadth, we may have on a vastly 

 larger scale a parallel to the rings of Saturn. The 

 breadth of the latter is only about one-third of the 

 breadth of one well-known stream of meteors, and 

 their length is not a quarter of a million of miles. If 

 then these rings of the planet are similarly composed 

 of separate masses, great and small, and are not con- 

 tinuous rings, perhaps 250 miles in thickness, a satellite 

 " floating in a fluid like water, or running in a notch, 



