Were this all that can be said about Saturn, the planet would scarcely be more than a reduced and somewhat less interesting edition of Jupiter. As it is, he possesses characteristics which make him Jupiter's rival in point of interest, and, as a mere telescopic picture, perhaps even his superior. When Galileo turned his telescope upon Saturn, he was presented with what seemed an insoluble enigma. It appeared to him that, instead of being a single globe, the planet consisted of three globes in contact with one another; and this supposed fact he intimated to Kepler in an anagram, which, when rearranged, read: 'Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi'--'I have observed the most distant planet to be threefold.' Under better conditions of observation, he remarked subsequently, the planet appeared like an olive, as it still does with low powers. This was sufficiently puzzling, but worse was to follow. After an interval, on observing Saturn again, he found that the appearances which had so perplexed him had altogether disappeared; the globe was single, like those of the other planets. In his letter to Welser, dated December 4, 1612, the great astronomer describes his bewilderment, and his fear lest, after all, it should turn out that his adversaries had been right, and that his discoveries had been mere illusions. Then followed a period when observers could only command optical power sufficient to show the puzzling nature of the planet's appendages, without revealing their true form. It appeared that Saturn had 'ansæ,' or handles, on either side of him, between which and his body the sky could be seen; and many uncouth figures are still preserved which eloquently testify to the bewilderment of those who drew them, though some of them are wonderfully accurate representations of the planet's appearance when seen with insufficient means. The bewilderment was sometimes veiled, in amusing cuttle-fish fashion, under an inky cloud of sesquipedalian words. Thus Hevelius describes the aspects of Saturn in the following blasting flight of projectiles: 'The mono-spherical, the tri-spherical, the spherico-ansated, the elliptico-ansated, and the spherico-cuspidated,' which is very beautiful no doubt, but scarcely so simple as one could wish a popular explanation to be.