No one supposes that Jupiter and Saturn are in the same condition of fierce and tempestuous heat as the sun. They may have been so once, but they must now have cooled down very many stages from that condition. Though no longer, however, a mass of far-reaching flames and fiery cyclones, the body of each may have only so far cooled as to have reached a stage of glowing molten red-heat, keeping all water in the form of vapor, and sending up strong rushes of burning air to cause the hurricanes which sweep to and fro the vast cloud-masses overhead. And if this be the case, then, with Saturn as with Jupiter, comes the question, Can Saturn be inhabited? And if--though we may not say it is impossible, yet we feel it to be utterly unlikely--then again follows the question, What if Saturn’s _moons_ are inhabited? Telescopic observations tempt us to believe that there is on this planet a quantity of heat greater than that which results from its distance from the sun; for the day-star as seen from Saturn is, as we have said, ninety times smaller in surface, and its heat and light are reduced in the same proportion. Water could only exist in the solid state of ice, and the vapor of water could not be produced so as to form clouds similar to ours. Now, meteorological variations are observed similar to those which we have noticed on Jupiter, but less intense. Facts, then, combine with theory to show us that the world of Saturn is at a temperature at least as high as ours, if not higher. But the strangest feature of the Saturnian calendar is, unquestionably, its being complicated, not only with the fabulous number of 25,060 days in a year, but, further, with eight different kinds of months, of which the length varies from 22 hours to 79 days--that is to say, from about two Saturnian days to 167. It is as if we had here _eight moons revolving in eight different periods_. The inhabitants of such a world must assuredly differ strangely from us from all points of view. The specific lightness of the Saturnian substances and the density of the atmosphere will have conducted the vital organization in an extra-terrestrial direction, and the manifestations of life will be produced and developed under unimaginable forms. To suppose that there is nothing fixed, that the planet itself is but a skeleton, that the surface is liquid, that the living beings are gelatinous--in a word, that all is unstable--would be to surpass the limits of scientific induction. The diameter of the largest moon is about half the diameter of the earth, or much larger than Mercury. The four inner satellites are all nearer to Saturn than our moon to us, though the most distant of the eight is ten times as far away. The inner moon takes less than twenty-three hours to travel round Saturn, and the outer one over seventy-nine days.