to you almost as imperfect in their functions as the zoophytes of the polar sea, to which they are not unlike in their apparent organization to your eyes, have a sphere of sensibility and intellectual enjoyment far superior to that of the inhabitants of your earth.  Each of those tubes, which appears like the trunk of an elephant, is an organ of peculiar motion or sensation.  They have many modes of perception of which you are wholly ignorant, at the same time that their sphere of vision is infinitely more extended than yours, and their organs of touch far more perfect and exquisite.’”

After descanting upon the advantages of Saturn’s position for surveying some of the phenomena of the solar system and of outer space, and the consequent immense advances that the Saturnians have made in astronomical knowledge, the Genius continues: 

“’If I were to show you the different parts of the surface of this planet you would see the marvelous results of the powers possessed by these highly intellectual beings, and of the wonderful manner in which they have applied and modified matter.  Those columnar masses, which seem to you as if rising out of a mass of ice below, are results of art, and processes are going on within them connected with the formation and perfection of their food.  The brilliant-colored fluids are the results of such operations as on the earth would be performed in your laboratories, or more properly in your refined culinary apparatus, for they are connected with their system of nourishment.  Those opaque azure clouds, to which you saw a few minutes ago one of those beings directing his course, are works of art, and places in which they move through different regions of their atmosphere, and command the temperature and the quantity of light most fitted for their philosophical researches, or most convenient for the purposes of life.’"[11]

[Footnote 11:  Davy, of course, was aware that, owing to increase of distance, the sun would appear to an inhabitant of Saturn with a disk only one ninetieth as great in area as that which it presents to our eyes.]

But, while Saturn does not appear, with our present knowledge, to hold out any encouragement to those who would regard it as the abode of living creatures capable of being described in any terms except those of pure imagination, yet it is so unique a curiosity among the heavenly bodies that one returns again and again to the contemplation of its strange details.  Saturn has nine moons, but some of them are relatively small bodies—­the ninth, discovered photographically by Professor Pickering in 1899, being especially minute—­and others are situated at great distances from the planet, and for these reasons, together with the fact that the sunlight is so feeble upon them that, surface for surface, they have only one ninetieth as much illumination as our moon receives, they can not make a very brilliant display in the Saturnian sky.  To astronomers on Saturn they would, of course, be intensely interesting because of their perturbations and particularly the effect of their attraction on the rings.