54 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



years have elapsed from the time of the autumnal equinox. The 

 morning and evening eclipses continue for more than a year, gradu- 

 ally extending until the sun is eclipsed during the whole day. These 

 total eclipses continue to the winter solstice, and for a corresponding 

 period after the winter solstice ; in all, for six years, 236 days, or 5,543 

 Saturnian days. This period is followed by more than a year of morn- 

 ing and evening eclipses. The total period during which eclipses of 

 one kind or another take place is no less than eight years, 293 days. 

 If we remember that latitude 40° on Saturn corresponds with the lati- 

 tude of Madrid on our earth, it will be seen how largely the rings 

 must influence the conditions of habitability of Saturn's globe, con- 

 sidered with reference to the wants of beings constituted like the in- 

 habitants of our earth." * In the presence of such facts as these, we 

 may follow Sir John Herschel in saying that " we should do wrong to 

 judge of the fitness or unfitness of the arrangements described, from 

 what we see around us, when perhaps the very combinations which 

 convey to our minds only images of horror may be in reality theatres 

 of the most striking and glorious displays of beneficent contrivance." 

 But we do well to exercise our minds in inquiring how this may be ; 

 and, as it appears to us, the views which have been advocated in this 

 essay at once afford an answer to this inquiry. We are taught to see 

 in the Saturnian satellites a family of worlds dependent on him, in the 

 same way that the members of the solar family are dependent on the 

 sun. We see that, though the satellites can supply Saturn with very 

 little light, he can supply them, whether by reflection or by inherent 

 luminosity, with much. And, lastly, we see that the ring-system 

 (which has been shown to consist of a multitude of small bodies, each 

 traveling in its own course), while causing no inconvenience by eclips- 

 ing parts of Saturn, may not improbably serve highly-important pur- 

 poses by maintaining an incessant downfall of meteoric matter upon 

 his surface, and thus sustaining the Saturnian heat, in a manner not 

 unlike that in which it is now generally believed that a portion at 

 least of the sun's heat-supply is maintained by the fall of interplanetary 

 meteors. In fine, we see in Saturn and his system a miniature, and a 

 singularly truthful miniature, of the solar system. In one system, as 

 in the other, there is a central orb, far surpassing all the members of 

 the system in bulk and mass ; in each system there are eight orbs 

 circling around the central body; and, lastly, each system exhibits, 

 close by the central orb, a multitude of discrete bodies — the zodiacal 

 light in the solar system, and the scheme of rings in the Saturnian 

 system — doubtless subserving important though as yet unexplained 

 purposes in the economy of the systems to which they belong. — Corn- 

 hill Magazine. 



1 As this passage has been quoted nearly verbatim, and without any sort of acknowl- 

 edgment, in a compilation on " Elementary Astronomy," recently published, the present 

 writer, that he may not be suspected of plagiarism, ventures to point out that it is not he 

 who is the borrower. 



