[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.  Indeed, Dr. Dick found room for more inhabitants on Saturn’s rings than on Saturn itself, for, excluding the gauze ring, undiscovered in his day, the two surfaces of the rings are greater in area than the surface of the globe of the planet.  He did not attack the problem of the weight of bodies on worlds in the form of broad, flat, thin, surfaces like Saturn’s rings, or indulge in any reflections on the interrelations of the inhabitants of the opposite sides, although he described the wonderful appearance of Saturn and other celestial objects as viewed from the rings.

But all these speculations fall to the ground in face of the simple fact that if we could reach Saturn’s rings we should find nothing to stand upon, except a cloud of swiftly flying dust or a swarm of meteors, swayed by contending attractions.  And, indeed, it is likely that upon arriving in the immediate neighborhood of the rings they would virtually disappear!  Seen close at hand their component particles might be so widely separated that all appearance of connection between them would vanish, and it has been estimated that from Saturn’s surface the rings, instead of presenting a gorgeous arch spanning the heavens, may be visible only as a faintly gleaming band, like the Milky Way or the zodiacal light.  In this respect the mystic Swedenborg appears to have had a clearer conception of the true nature of Saturn’s rings than did Dr. Dick, for in his book on The Earths in the Universe he says—­using the word “belt” to describe the phenomenon of the rings: