not come out of the place at which it was put in, and at length was too big for the glass itself, though that were of large capacity. So may it be with man in the ethereal air. Onions will shoot out and grow as they hang in common air. Birds of paradise, having no legs, live constantly in and upon air, laying their eggs on one another's backs, and sitting on each other while they hatch them. And, if none of these possibilities be admitted, why, we can take our provision with us. Once up the twenty miles, we could carry any quantity of it the rest of the way, for a ship-load would be lighter than a feather. Sleep, probably, with nothing to fatigue us, we should no longer require; but if we did, we cannot desire a softer bed than the air, where we may repose ourselves firmly and safely as in our chambers. As for that difficulty of the first twenty miles, it is not impossible to make a flying chariot and give it motion through the air. If possible, it can be made large enough to carry men and stores, for size is nothing if the motive faculty be answerable there to the great ship swims as well as the small cork, and an eagle flies in the air as well as a little gnat. Indeed, we might have regular Great Eastern packets plying between London and No Gravitation Point, to which they might take up houses, cattle, and all stores found necessary to the gradual construction of a town upon the borders of the over-ether route to any of the planets. Stations could be established, if necessary, along the routes to the moon, Mars, Venus, Saturn, and the rest of the new places of resort; some London society could create and endow a new Bishop of Jupiter; and daring travellers would bring us home their journals of a Day in Saturn, or Ten Weeks in Mars, while sportsmen might make parties for the hippogriff shooting in Mercury, or bag chimeras on the mountains of the moon.

Well, in whatever way we may get there, we are off now for a stroll to

Saturn, with Mr. R. A. Proctor for comrade and cicerone, but turning a deaf ear to him whenever, as often occurs, he is too learned for us, and asks us to "let N P' P" N' represent the northern half of Saturn's orbit (viewed in perspective), n En E the earth's orbit, and N p p' p" N' the projection of Saturn's orbit on the plane of the earth's orbit. Let NS N' be the line of Saturn's nodes on this plane, and let S P' be at right angles to N S, N', so that when at P Saturn is at his greatest distance from the ecliptic on the northern side." When of such things we are asked to let them be, we let them be, and are, in the denseness of our ignorance, only too glad to be allowed, not to say asked, to do so. We attend only, like most of our neighbors, to what is easy to us. Sun is gold, and moon is silver; Mars is iron, Mercury quicksil ver, which we, in fact, rather like still to call Mercury, thinking nothing at all of the imprisoned god with the winged heels when we ask how is the mercury in the thermometer. Jove is tin; yes, by Jove, tin is the chief among the gods, says little Swizzles, who, by a miracle, remembers one thing that he learnt at school-Jove's chieftainship among the heathen deities. Venus is copper, for the Cyprian is Cuprian; and as for Saturn, he is lead. A miserable old fellow they made Saturn out in the days of the star-decipherers. Mine, Chaucer makes Saturn say, is the drowning in wan waters, the dark prison, the strangling and hanging, murmur of discontent, and the rebellion of churls. I am the poisoner and the housebreaker, I topple down the high halls, and make towers fall upon their builders, earth upon its miners. I sent the temple roof down upon Samson. I give you all your treasons, and your cold diseases, and your pestilences. This is the sort of estimation in which our forefathers held the respectable old gentleman we are now going out

to see.

When Galileo's eyes went out to

illuminating the nights of the Saturnian, the globe and moons enlightening the dark parts of the rings, and the planet and rings throwing back the sun's beams upon the moons when they are deprived of them at the time of their conjunctions." During the present century, other observers have detected more divisions of the ring, one separating the outer ring into two rings of equal breadth seems to be permanent. It is to be seen only by the best telescopes, under the most favorable conditions. Many other and lesser indications of division have also at different times been observed. Seventeen years ago an eighth satellite of Saturn was discovered by Mr. Bond in America, and by Mr. Lassell in England. Two years later, that is to say, in November, eighteen fifty, a third ring of singular appearance was discovered inside the two others by Mr. Bond, and, a few days later, but independently, by Mr. Dawes and by Mr. Lassell in England. It is not bright like the others, but dusky, almost purple, and it is transparent, not even distorting the outline of the body of the planet seen through it. This ring was very easily seen by good telescopes, and presently became visible through telescopes of only four inch aperture. In Herschel's time it was so dim that it was figured as a belt upon the body of the planet. Now it is not only distinct, but it has been increasing in width since the time of its discovery.

These were not all the marvels. One of the chief of the wonders since discovered was a faint overlapping light, differing much in color from the ordinary light of the ring, which light, a year and a half ago, Mr. Wray saw distinctly stretched on either side from the dark shade on the ball overlapping the fine line of light by the edge of the ring to the extent of about onethird of its length, and so as to give the impression that it was the dusky ring, very much thicker than the bright rings, and, seen edgewise, projected on the sky. Well may we be

told by our guide, Mr. Proctor, that no object in the heavens presents so beautiful an appearance as Saturn, viewed with an instrument of adequate power. The golden disc, faintly striped with silver-tinted belts; the circling rings, with their various shades of brilliancy and color; and the perfect symmetry of the system as it sweeps across the dark background of the field of view, combine to form a picture as charming as it is sublime and impressive.

What

But what does it all mean? is the use of this strange furniture in the House of Saturn, which is like nothing else among the known things of the universe? Maupertuis thought that Saturn's ring was a comet's tail cut off by the attraction of the planet as it passed, and compelled to circle round it thenceforth and for ever. Buffon thought the ring was the equatorial region of the planet which had been thrown off and left revolving while the globe to which it had be longed contracted to its present size. Other theories also went upon the assumption that the rings are solid. But if they are solid, how is it that they exhibit traces of varying division and reunion, and what are we to think of certain mottled or dusky stripes concentric with the rings, which stripes, appearing to indicate that the ring where they occur is semi-transpar ent, also are not permanent? Then. again, what are we to think of the growth within the last seventy years of the transparent dark ring which does not, as even air would, refract the image of that which is seen through it, and that is becoming more opaque every year? Then, again. how is it that the immense width of the rings has been steadily increasing by the approach of their inner edge to the body of the planet? The bright ring, once twenty-three thousand miles wide, was five thousand miles wider in Herschel's time, and has now a width of twenty-eight thousand three hundred on a surface of more than twelve thousand millions of

square miles, while the thickness is only a hundred miles or less. Eight years ago, Mr. J. Clerk Maxwell obtained the Adams prize of the University of Cambridge for an essay upon Saturn's rings, which showed that if they were solid there would be necessary to stability an appearance altogether different from that of the actual system. But if not solid, are they fluid, are they a great isolated ocean poised in the Saturnian mid air? If there were such an ocean, it is shown that it would be exposed to influences forming waves that would be broken up into fluid satellites.

But possibly the rings are formed of flights of disconnected satellites, so small and so closely packed that, at the immense distance to which Saturn is removed, they appear to form a continuous mass, while the dark inner mass may have been recently formed of satellites drawn by disturbing attractions or collisions out of the bright outer ring, and so thinly scattered that they give to us only a sense of darkness without obscuring, and of course without refracting, the surface before which they spin. This is, in our guide's opinion, the true solution of the problem, and to the bulging of Saturn's equator, which determines the line of superior attraction, he ascribes the thinness of the system of satellites, in which each is compelled to travel near the plane of the great planet's equator.

Whatever be the truth about these vast provisions for the wants of Satum, surely there must be living inhabitants there to whose needs they are wisely adapted. Travel among the other planets would have its inus of the earth. Light walking as it might be across the fields of ether, we should have half our weight given to us again in

conveniences to

Mars or Mercury, while in Jupiter our weight would be doubled, and we should drag our limbs with pain. In Saturn, owing to the compression of the vast light globe and its rapid rotation, a man who weighs twelve stone at the equator weighs fourteen stone at the pole. Though vast in size, the density of the planet is small, for which reason we should not find ourselves very much heavier by change of ground from earth to Saturn. We should be cold, for Saturn gets only a ninetieth part of the earth's allowance of light and heat. But then there is no lack of blanket in the House of Saturn, for there is a thick atmosphere to keep the warmth in the old gentleman's body and to lengthen the Saturnian twilights. As for the abatement of light, we know how much light yet remains to us when less than a ninetieth part of the sun escapes eclipse. We see in its brightness, as a star, though a pale one, the reflection of the sunshine Saturn gets, which if but a ninetieth part of our share, yet leaves the sun of Saturn able to give five hundred and sixty times more light than our own brightest moonshine. And then what long summers! The day in Saturn is only ten and a half hours long, so that the nights are short, and there are twentyfour thousand six hundred and eighteen and a half of its own days to the Saturnian year. But the long winters! And the Saturnian winter has its gloom increased by eclipses of the sun's light by the rings. At Saturn's equator these eclipses occur near the equinoxes and last but a little while, but in the regions corresponding to our temperate zone they are of long duration. Apart from eclipse, the rings lighten for Saturn the short summer nights, and lie perhaps as a halo under the sun during the short winter days.

WHEN Mrs. Caxton innocently Inade her wiser-half the father of an anachronism, that worthy scholar was much troubled in consequence. His anachronism was a living one, or he might have comforted himself by reflecting that greater authors than he had stood in the same paternal predicament. Our old English dramatists took tremendous liberties this way, never allowing considerations of time and place to stand in the way of any allusion likely to tell with their audience. Shakespeare would have been slow to appreciate a modern manager's anxiety for archæological fidelity. His Greeks and Romans talk about cannons and pistols, and his Italian clowns are thorough cockneys, familiar with every nook and corner of London. And so it is with other caterers for the stage. Nat Lee talks about cards in his tragedy of " Hannibal;" Otway makes Spartan notables carouse and drink deep; Mrs. Cowley's Lacedæmonian king speaks of the night's still Sabbath; D'Urfey's ancient Britons are familiar with Puritans and packet-boats; and Rymer (though he set himself up for a critic) supplies a stage direction for the representative of his Saxon heroine to pull off her patches, when her lover desires her to lay aside her orna

ments.

When Colman read "Inkle and Yarico" to Dr. Moseley, the latter exclaimed: "It won't do. Stuff! Nonsense!""Why?" asked the alarmed dramatist." Why, you say in the finale:

'Come let us dance and sing,

While all Barbadoes' bells shail ring l

It won't do; there is but one bell in the island " This mistake was ex

cusable enough; but when Milton described

"A green mantling vine, That crawls along the side of yon small hill,"

he must certainly have forgotten he had laid the scene of "Comus" in North Wales. Ernest Jones, describing a battle in his poem, "The Lost Army," says:

"Delay and doubt did more that hour

Than bayonet-charge or carnage shower;"

and some lines further on pictures his hero

"All worn with wounds, when day was low,

With severed sword and shattered shield;""

thus making his battle rather a trial of the respective powers of ancient and modern weapons than a conflict between equally-armed foes. Mr. Thackeray perpetrates a nice little anachronism in "The Newcomes," when he makes Clive, in a letter dated 183-, quoting an Academy exhibition critique, ask: "Why have we no picture of the sovereign and her august consort from Smee's brush?"-the author, in his anxiety to compliment the artist, forgetting that there was no consort till 1840.

A bull in a china-shop is scarcely more out of place than a bull in a se rious poem, but accidents will happen to the most regular of writers. Thus Milton's pen slipped when he wrote: