“a space Of sky extends not more than three ells wide,”[24]
but where there is scarcely a chink of a nail’s-breadth all round.
Do indeed the astrologers rightly ascribe to Saturn the guardianship of miners, who, accustomed to spend their lives, like moles, underground, seldom breathe the free air under the open sky? Although the darkness here is rather more supportable than in Saturn, because the sun, which appears there only as large as Venus appears to us on the earth, continually casts its rays through the spaces between the different orbs in such a way that those inhabitants who are situated on one orb are covered by the other as by a ceiling; while those on the latter orb, on the top of this roof of theirs, exposed as it is to the full light of the sun, receive a glare as if from very firebrands. But I must draw in the reins and check my mind in its enjoyment of the free fields of ether; for fear, perchance, later observations should report something different from the first account, something changed in course of time.[25]
[25] The completion of Galileo’s observations on Saturn depended on the improvement of astronomical instruments, as will be evident from the following sketch. Galileo made out the first indications of Saturn’s ring in 1610, as narrated in his letter, with a power of thirty; but in December 1612 he wrote to one of his friends, Marco Velseri, that he could no longer see these indications, and began to imagine that his telescope had deceived him, and apparently abandoned further researches. Hevelius in 1642 saw the ring more clearly, but figured it as two crescents attached to Saturn by their cusps. At length, in 1653, Huyghens provided himself with a power of one hundred, having made the lenses with his own hands, and immediately discovered the explanation of the phenomena which had baffled previous observers. He published his explanation of Saturn’s ring, and his discovery of the first satellite, in his _Systema Saturnium_, 1659. Cassini, with still more powerful instruments, discovered four more satellites in 1671, 1672, 1684. Sir William Herschel in 1789 detected two more, “which can only be seen with telescopes of extraordinary power and perfection, and under the most favourable atmospheric circumstances.”—(HERSCHEL, _Outlines of Astronomy_, § 548.) And the last of the eight satellites was discovered in 1848 by Lassell of Liverpool, and Bond of Cambridge, U.S., simultaneously.