Like this appears also the condition of Jupiter (Fig. 62), the greatest of the planets, whose globe, eighty-eight thousand miles in diameter, turns so rapidly that the centrifugal force causes a visible flattening. The belts which stretch across its disk are of all delicate tints--some pale blue, some of a crimson lake; a sea-green patch has been seen, and at intervals of late years there has been a great oval red spot, which has now nearly gone, and which our engraving does not show. The belts are largely, if not wholly, formed of rolling clouds, drifting and changing under our eyes, though more rarely a feature like the oval spot just mentioned will last for years, an enduring enigma. The most recent observations tend to make us believe that the equatorial regions of Jupiter, like those of the sun, make more turns in a year than the polar ones; while the darkening toward the edge is another sunlike feature, though perhaps due to a distinct cause, and this is beautifully brought out when any one of the four moons which circle the planet passes between us and its face, an occurrence also represented in our figure. The moon, as it steals on the comparatively dark edge, shows us a little circle of an almost lemon-yellow, but the effect of contrast grows less as it approaches the centre. Next (or sometimes before), the disk is invaded by a small and intensely black spot, the shadow of the moon, which slides across the planet’s face, the transit lasting long enough for us to see that the whole great globe, serving as a background for the spectacle, has visibly revolved on its axis since we began to gaze. Photography, in the skilful hands of the late Professor Henry Draper, gave us reason to suspect the possibility that a dull light is sent to us from parts of the planet’s surface besides what it reflects, as though it were still feebly glowing like a nearly extinguished sun; and, on the whole, a main interest of these features to us lies in the presumption they create that the giant planet is not yet fit to be the abode of life, but is more probably in a condition like that of our earth millions of years since, in a past so remote that geology only infers its existence, and long before our own race began to be. That science, indeed, itself teaches us that such all but infinite periods are needed to prepare a planet for man’s abode, that the entire duration of his race upon it is probably brief in comparison. * * * * *