Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/64

54 years have elapsed from the time of the autumnal equinox. The morning and evening eclipses continue for more than a year, gradually 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 morning 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 latitude of Madrid on our earth, it will be seen how largely the rings must influence the conditions of habitability of Saturn's globe, considered with reference to the wants of beings constituted like the inhabitants 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 eclipsing parts of Saturn, may not improbably serve highly-important purposes 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.—Cornhill Magazine.