But the serious condition for Saturn would come from that feature which renders it by far the most attractive of all the planets seen in the telescope, the presence of the wonderful Ring system. To us, viewing Saturn from afar, and from practically the same direction as the Sun, the Rings are seen lit up; but to a dweller on Saturn, the Rings during the day are between his world and the Sun, and hence turn their dark side toward him. More than that, the telescope shows us that the Rings cast a shadow on the planet; in other words, they eclipse part of it; and this shadow changes its position with the progress of the Saturnian year. Proctor computed that if the Rings were a hundred miles in thickness, the equator would suffer, in consequence, total eclipse for nearly ten days at each equinox, and partial eclipse for about forty days more. Moving away from the equator, each higher latitude would have a longer and longer period of eclipse in the winter half of its year; the higher the latitude, the later after the autumnal equinox the eclipse would begin, and the longer it would last, until about latitude 40° was reached. Here the eclipses would begin nearly three terrestrial years after the time of the autumnal equinox. At first the Sun would be eclipsed only in the morning and evening of each day, but the length of the daily eclipse would increase, until the Sun was hidden the whole day long. This period of total eclipse would last for about 6 years 8 months, terrestrial reckoning, or with the periods of partial eclipse, 8 years and nearly 10 months. Whatever the efficiency of the Sun that afforded light and heat to such a planet, it is clear that such eclipses must be fatal to life in two ways: light and heat would be cut off from wide regions of the planet for long periods of time, and terrible meteorological convulsions must follow in the train. Here on the Earth, though a total eclipse generally lasts only two or three minutes, the atmospheric disturbance is perceptible, and the fall of temperature very marked, and it does not require much reflection to see that the analogous disturbance in an atmosphere twenty times as dense must be terrific indeed during an eclipse that lasts not a few minutes only, but for more than six of our years.