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