Far beyond Jupiter rolls another stupendous orb called Saturn, not so large as Jupiter, but still immense, being 847 times the bulk of the earth. It is placed at the distance of 906 millions of miles from the sun. An idea of this may be formed from the fact that light, which travels at the rate of nearly 200,000 miles a second or 12,000,000 a minute, takes about an hour and a quarter to pass from the sun to Saturn. It performs its journey round the sun only in 29-1/2 years, which are therefore but as one year, yet all this time it is moving at the rate of nearly 22,000 miles an hour, so immense is the orbit it has to traverse, but it revolves on its axis in about 10-1/2 hours, so that the nights and days are extremely short while the years are prodigiously long. There is every reason to believe that it has changes of seasons and variation of climate similar to those in our world, but, being so far from the sun, they must be altogether more severe than ours. The most extraordinary part of this great globe is its possession of three (perhaps more) great flattened rings, which surround it, one within the other; these rings are of immense size and width, but very thin, the great breadth through all from the inner to the outer edges being about 30,000 miles, while their thickness cannot exceed 250. These rings are placed at a right angle to the planet's axis of rotation and revolve with it, so that when the planet is at the equinox, the edge of these rings is turned towards the sun, they can then be seen only by the most powerful telescopes, forming a faint streak on each side of the orb of the planet (fig. 19), but as they become inclined they appear as a very long ellipse, the ends of which project in loop-like forms on either side, giving rise to the notion of the planet having two handles (fig. 20). This ellipse becomes broader and broader as the plane of the rings forms a greater angle with the line of vision. For a short time before and after the equinoxes of Saturn, the rings become invisible, owing to the earth and sun being on opposite sides of them, as may be seen in fig. 21, so that the darkened side is turned towards the earth and the edge, which is the only part illuminated, is towards the sun. [Illustration: FIG. 20.] [Illustration: FIG. 21.]