Page:The Music of the Spheres.djvu/285

 fore it was time to go to bed. But perhaps the future Saturnian will be so constructed that he does not have to spend so many hours in sleep, or perhaps, as in the Golden Age when the god Saturn ruled on earth and the needs of man were brought forth without labor, this length of day would be quite enough for general entertainment. Again, they might be such quick-witted creatures that they could accomplish a thing while we were thinking about it, or, yet again, they might not care to slave all their days in order to indulge in such foolishly complex lives as we do here and 5 hours would prove a great plenty. How we do ramble on! Yet is it not a little fun to stop a moment and conjecture about folks on a distant world? Perhaps they could never be—perhaps Saturn may never mature into a habitable globe—but then, who knows?

John H. Thayer in his interesting article on Saturn in Popular Astronomy, March, 1919, says: "If you want to see a picture painted as only the hand of God can paint it, go with me to Saturn." He then beautifully describes the scene of the wonderful band of silvery light which arches the sky near the equator, and the bewildering panorama of many moons, full round disks, quarter phases and thin crescents displayed in the Saturnian nights. Not only would the nights be startling to an earth-being; during the daytime their tiny sun would skim across the sky at the rate of about the distance of the diameter of the moon in every minute, and then after the sun literally dropped below the horizon, the stars and crescents and disks and quarters of moons would shoot across equally fast.

Suppose all the inhabitants of the solar system were forced to exist in a medium like the ocean, for instance, to know nothing of such celestial scenes; perhaps the unfortunate inhabitants of