[12]
[Footnote 12: For further details about Saturn's rings, see The Tides,
by G.H. Darwin, chap. xx.]
It has been thought that the gauze ring is variable in brightness. This
would tend to show that it is composed of bodies which have been drawn
in toward the planet from the principal mass of the rings, and these
bodies may end their career by falling upon the planet. This process,
indefinitely continued, would result in the total disappearance of the
rings--Saturn would finally swallow them, as the old god from whom the
planet gets its name is fabled to have swallowed his children.
Near the beginning of this chapter reference was made to the fact that
Saturn's rings have been regarded as habitable bodies. That, of course,
was before the discovery that they were not solid. Knowing what we now
know about them, even Dr. Thomas Dick, the great Scotch popularizer of
astronomy in the first half of the nineteenth century, would have been
compelled to abandon his theory that Saturn's rings were crowded with
inhabitants. At the rate of 280 to the square mile he reckoned that they
could easily contain 8,078,102,266,080 people.
He even seems to have regarded their edges--in his time their actual
thinness was already well known--as useful ground for the support of
living creatures, for he carefully calculated the aggregate area of
these edges and found that it considerably exceeded the area of the
entire surface of the earth.
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