4° 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



contemplate drawings which show how the planet looks under tele- 

 scopic scrutiny. This will at once appear when we consider that Sat- 

 urn never lies at a less distance than 732,000,000 miles from the earth. 

 With the most powerful telescope we see him no better (taking atmos- 

 pheric effects into account) than we should if this distance were re- 

 duced to about a million miles. It is manifest that at this enormous 

 distance all save the general features of his globe and of his rings 

 must be indistinguishable. Where we seem to see a smooth, solid 

 globe striped with belts, there may be an orb no part of which is solid, 





Fig. 1. 









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Telescopic Aspect of Saturn, and Size compared -with the Earth. 



girt round by masses of matter lying many miles above its seeming 

 surface. Where we seem to see solid, flat rings, neatly divided one 

 from the other either by dark spaces or by difference of tint, there may 

 be no continuous rings at all; the apparent spaces maybe no real 

 gaps ; the difference of tint may imply no difference of material. On 

 these and other points, the known facts afford important evidence, 

 and, by reasoning upon them, we are. carried far beyond the results 

 directly conveyed to us by telescopic researches. 



Saturn is distinguished, in the first place, by the enormous range 

 of his orbit, not merely in distance from the sun, but in the distances 

 which separate it from the orbits of his neighbor planets. His mean 

 distance from the sun is about 872,000,000 miles, his actual range of 

 distance lying between 921,000,000 and 823,000,000. These figures are 

 imposing, but they are, in fact, meaningless save by comparison with 



