to foretell the different phases of the ring, to
announce to astronomers when each feature can be best seen, and at what
hour each element can be best determined. He has also to predict the
times of the movements of Saturn's satellites, and the other phenomena
of a system more elaborate than that of Jupiter.

Lastly, if the astronomer be one of that class--perhaps, from some
points of view, the highest class of all--who employ the most profound
researches of the human intellect to unravel the dynamical problems of
astronomy, he, too, finds in Saturn problems which test to the utmost,
even if they do not utterly transcend, the loftiest flights of analysis.
He discovers in Saturn's ring an object so utterly unlike anything else,
that new mathematical weapons have to be forged for the encounter. He
finds in the system so many extraordinary features, and such delicacy of
adjustment, that he is constrained to admit that if he did not actually
see Saturn's rings before him, he would not have thought that such a
system was possible. The mathematician's labours on this wondrous system
are at present only in their infancy. Not alone are the researches of so
abstruse a character as to demand the highest genius for this branch of
science, but even yet the materials for the inquiry have not been
accumulated. In a discussion of this character, observation must precede
calculation. The scanty observations hitherto obtained, however they may
illustrate the beauty of the system, are still utterly insufficient to
form the basis of that great mathematical theory of Saturn which must
eventually be written.

But Saturn possesses an interest for a far more numerous class of
persons than those who are specially devoted to astronomy. It is of
interest, it must be of interest, to every cultivated person who has the
slightest love for nature. A lover of the picturesque cannot behold
Saturn in a telescope without feelings of the liveliest emotion; while,
if his reading and reflection have previously rendered him aware of the
colossal magnitude of the object at which he is looking, he will be
constrained to admit that no more remarkable spectacle is presented in
the whole of nature.

We have pondered so long over the fascinations of Saturn's ring that we
can only give a very brief account of that system of satellites by which
the planet is attended. We have already had occasion to allude more than
once to these bodies; it only remains now to e