Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 157, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 July 1910 — Planet Problems. [ARTICLE]

Planet Problems.

“The amount of ignorance not yet removed concerning the planets is very great,” writes E. S. Grew. “We do not know, for example, whether the planet Venus rotates If it does it may possibly have a life and a vegetation tike our own, though we suspect that it is clothed in eternal cloud. Of Saturn’s rings we cannot say whether they consist of millions of tiny moons like brickbats or whether they may be even smaller still—a veil of shining dust. Of Jupiter we can only say that it is covered with clouds, though of their substance we know nothing, and, according tb Professor Lowell and Sir William Huggins, some of the bands we see on it may be rifts in the clouds revealing the body of the planet. Little lines crisscross these bands. Photographs of Jupiter taken at Flagstaff observatory seem to Indicate that these lines too, are the upper clouds of Jupiter. “But whenever we see a planet we see It badly. Even Mars, the most clearly revealed of them all, is constantly obscured by a refracting haze, so that even the famous ‘canals,’ though nearly 500 in number, only a few are perceptible at a time, and an unskilled observer would probably not make them out at all. Sandstorms, sometimes snowstorms, sweep surface of the planet, and because the winds of Mars are very gentle and slow moving these occurrences take a long time to pass by.”—London Family Herald.