bright inner, and a "crape" or slate-coloured ring nearer still to the planet. Did Herschel not see and figure all three, only failing to observe the interval between the very bright and the "crape" ring? We can only express our surprise if one so quick of eye, and so careful to observe, ascribed to the bright ring in 1794, what he did not see or delineate on it in 1792, if the "crape" existed then as it exists now.
Fifty years after, Sir John Herschel, when at the Cape of Good Hope, made a careful search for the two moons discovered by his illustrious father. He had all but given it up in despair when, looking for the other five "with the 20-feet reflector," which he took with him to South Africa, "and a polished new mirror, there stood Mr. Sixth! . . . Next night it was kept in view long enough for Saturn to have left it behind by its own motion, had it been a star. . . . So this is at last a thing made out," he writes. "As for No. Seven, I have no hope of ever seeing it."
Since Herschel's time the minds of men have become familiar with strings of meteorites, millions of miles in length, through which our earth plunges in its yearly journey round the sun. If they form, or come in time to form, a continuous ring about the sun, one hundred thousand miles in breadth, we may have on a vastly larger scale a parallel to the rings of Saturn. The breadth of the latter is only about one-third of the breadth of one well-known stream of meteors, and their length is not a quarter of a million of miles. If then these rings of the planet are similarly composed of separate masses, great and small, and are not continuous rings, perhaps 250 miles in thickness, a satellite "floating in a fluid like water, or running in a notch,
