In large planets this outgrowing of seasons occurs before they have any, while the planet is yet cloud-wrapped. Such planets know nothing of some attributes of youth, like those unfortunate men who never were boys; just as reversely the meteorites are boys that never grew up. For if the planet be large, the action of the tidal forces is proportionately more powerful; while on the other hand the self-aging of the planet is greatly prolonged, and thus it may come about that the former process outstrips the latter to the missing of seasons entirely. This is sure to be the case with Jupiter, as the equator has already got down to within 3° of the orbit, and threatens to be the case with Saturn. These bodies, then, when they shall have put off their swaddling clothes of cloud, will wake to climates without seasons; globes where conditions are always the same on the same belts of latitude, and on which these alter progressively from equator to pole. Variety other than diurnal is thus excluded from their surfaces and from their skies. For the Sun and stars will rise always the same, in punctual obedience only to the slowly shifting year. The next stage of deprivation is the parting with the day. Although the day disappears, the result is too much day or too little, depending on where you choose to consider yourself upon the afflicted orb. For tidal friction proceeds to lengthen the twenty-four or other hours first to weeks, then months, then years, and at last to infinity; thus bringing the sun to a stock-still on the meridian, to flood one side of the world with perpetual day and plunge the other in eternal night. Which of these two hemispheres would be the worse abode, is matter of personal predilection; dust or glacier, deserts both. Everlasting unshielded noon would cause a wind circulation from all points of the enlightened periphery to the centre, whence a funnel-shaped current would rise to overflow back into the antipodes, thence to return by the horizon again. As the night side would be several hundred degrees at least colder than the noon one, all the moisture would be evaporated on the sunlit hemisphere, to be carried round and deposited as ice on the other, there to stay. Life would be either toasted or _frappé_. A Sahara backed by polar regions would be the obverse and the reverse of the shield. [Illustration: October 15, 1896.] [Illustration: February 12, 1897.] [Illustration: March 26, 1897. VENUS—DRAWINGS BY DR. LOWELL SHOWING AGREEMENT AT DIFFERENT DISTANCES.]