the same instrument by Professor Holden) the line seems continuous, though curved as though the middle of the ring system were thicker than the edge. The rotation of the ring has been made out by direct observations; and the whole is in motion about the globe,--a motion so smooth and steady that there is no flickering in the shadow “where Saturn’s steadfast shade sleeps on its luminous ring.” [Illustration: FIG. 62.--JUPITER, MOON, AND SHADOW. (BY PERMISSION OF WARREN DE LA RUE.)] What is it? No solid could hold together under such conditions; we can hardly admit the possibility of its being a liquid film extended in space; and there are difficulties in admitting it to be gaseous. But if not a solid, a liquid, or a gas, again what can it be? It was suggested nearly two centuries ago that the ring might be composed of innumerable little bodies like meteorites, circling round the globe so close together as to give the appearance we see, much as a swarm of bees at a distance looks like a continuous cloud; and this remains the most plausible solution of what is still in some degree a mystery. Whatever it be, we see in the ring the condition of things which, according to the nebular hypothesis, once pertained to all the planets at a certain stage of their formation; and this, with the extraordinary lightness of the globe (for the whole planet would float on water), makes us look on it as still in the formative stage of uncondensed matter, where the solid land as yet is not, and the foot could find no resting-place. Astrology figured Saturn as “spiteful and cold,--an old man melancholy;” but if we may indulge such a speculation, modern astronomy rather leads us to think of it as in the infancy of its life, with every process of planetary growth still in its future, and separated by an almost unlimited stretch of years from the time when life under the conditions in which we know it can even begin to exist. * * * * *