oil the Planet Venus . 
123 
jecting luminous points on it till after October, 1789 ; but in 
February, 1790, incomparably more of them, in the frequent 
observations I made. These, in part at least, I considered not 
as satellites, but as true and large inequalities of the surface 
of the ring ; and thence drew, on the strongest grounds of 
probability, the same conclusions as Messier and other re- 
spectable observers had done 15 and 30 years before; one of 
those deductions, and which seemed highly probable, was, 
that the southern surface of the ring must have many more and 
larger inequalities than the northern. These remarks had al- 
ready been made known to the world, in the publications of 
the Naturalist Friends at Berlin;* when I unexpectedly read 
in the Philosophical Transactions a conclusion which discou- 
raged me very much, that the astronomers who considered 
these projecting luminous points as inequalities of the surface, 
were mistaken, those appearances being occasioned by the sa- 
tellites of Saturn : this conclusion was drawn from some new 
and excellent observations inserted in the paper itself, but 
which were continued only to November, 1789. However, so 
much the greater was my pleasure to find this assertion re- 
called in the next volume of the Transactions, where Dr. 
Herschel, from those very projections, has made the im- 
portant discovery of the rotation of the ring, and determined 
its period. Now, if there are really in the ring of Saturn such 
enormous inequalities, I do not see why my conclusion, de- 
duced from so many agreeing observations, namely, that the 
mountains of Venus bear nearly the same proportion in height to 
her diameter , as those of the moon do to the diameter of the moon , 
should be thought a wonderful relation, especially since all my 
Scbriften der Naturforschenden Freunde. 
Ra 
