Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 September 1875 — A Visit From Saturn. [ARTICLE]

A Visit From Saturn.

The planet Saturn has come to see us. It rises nightly with the full moon in the eastern heavens and passed into opposition with the sun on Sunday evening. The earth is now between the sun and the great planet, and 182,000,000 miles nearer the latter than when it is on the other side from us, for its distance then is a little more than a thousand millions of miles. His comparative neighborliness makes him and his rings more golden-bright than they are at other times, even to the unaided eye, and through a telescope gives opportunity for closer inspection: —The mystery of his luminous rings is a thing quite un solved, though astronomers have not spared their speculations. There are three belts of light; the two outer ones—one 21,000, the other 34,000 miles wide, separated by a gap of 1,800 miles, a mere thread in the tremendous diameter of the greater circle (176,000 miles); the third a mere misty shadow through which the planet’s substance is plainly seen, though 19,000 miles away. Some think these rings are envelopes of gaseous fluid, and Prof. Pierce, of Harvard, has reasoned out the conditions under which such a ring of fluid might be supported by the bright satellites of Saturn which revolve around them. Others, again, advance the theory that these rings are simply continuous successions of minute satellites, analogous to, though so infinitely more numerous than, the asteroids that circle around the sun, or those similar bodies which some astronomers have supposed to exist as additional' satellites to our earth, in order to explain the zodiacal light. Saturn is thought to be a world not yet cooled off for habitation, in a state of gaseous change; a realm of chaos, but hardly of old night. But these matters are, as yet, but conjectures. — Exchange. —A shrewd man in New York escaped judgment in a breach-of-promise suit by alleging that he had been entrapped into offering marriage by false pretenses. The next step will be to plead “ married by mistake” in proceedings for divorce. How many care-incumbered men, each bearing his burden of sorrow, will file into chancery then. —Every word that falls from the lips of mothers and sisters especially should be pure and concise and simple;not pearls such as fall from the lips of a princess, but sweet, good words that little children can gather without fear of soil or after shame or blame or any regrets to pain through all their life. >’