When it is remembered that Saturn’s winter--that is, the winter of each hemisphere in turn--lasts during fifteen of our years; and when we hear of total eclipses of the sun lasting unbroken through eight years of such a winter, with not even bright rings to make up for his absence, we can not think of Saturn as a tempting residence. The sun gives Saturn at his best only about one-ninetieth of the heat and light that he gives to our earth; but to be deprived of even that little for eight years at a time, does indeed sound somewhat melancholy. Looking now at the other side of the question, the possible inhabitants of the moons, especially those near at hand, would have splendid views of Saturn and his rings in all their varying phases. For Saturn is a beautiful globe, wrapped in his changeful envelope of clouds, which, seen through a telescope, are lit up often with rainbow tints of blue and gold; a creamy white belt lying usually on the equator; while around extend the purple and shining and gray rings, sometimes rivaling in bright colors Saturn himself. We are compelled to assume that the continuous appearance of the rings is not due to real continuity of substance, but that they are composed of flights of disconnected satellites, so small and so closely packed that, at the immense distance to which Saturn is removed, they appear to form a continuous mass. There are analogous instances in the Solar System. In the zone of asteroids we have an undoubted instance of a flight of disconnected bodies traveling in a ring about a central attracting mass. The existence of zones of meteorites traveling around the sun has long been accepted as the only probable explanation of the periodic returns of meteoric showers. Again, the singular phenomenon called the Zodiacal Light is, in all probability, caused by a ring of minute cosmical bodies surrounding the sun. In the Milky Way and in the ring-nebulæ we have other illustrations of similar arrangements in nature, belonging, however, to orders immeasurably vaster than any within the Solar System. The moons of Saturn do not, like those of Jupiter, travel in one plane. CHAPTER XIX. URANUS AND NEPTUNE. Till the year 1781, Saturn was believed to be the outermost planet of the Solar System, and nobody suspected the fact of two great, lonely brother-planets wandering around the same sun at vast distances beyond,--Uranus, nine hundred millions of miles from Saturn; Neptune, nine hundred millions of miles from Uranus. No wonder they remained long undiscovered. Uranus can sometimes be seen by the unaided eye as a dim star of the sixth magnitude. And when he was known for a planet, it was found that he _had_ been often so seen and noted. Again and again he had been taken for a fixed star, and as he moved on, disappearing from that particular spot, it was supposed that the star had vanished.