angle to our line of sight their shadow is seen on the planet, bordering
their outer edge where they cross the ball.

The gauze ring, the detection of which as a faintly luminous phenomenon
requires a powerful telescope, can be seen with slighter telescopic
power in the form of a light shade projected against the planet at the
inner edge of the broad bright ring. The explanation of the existence of
this peculiar object depends upon the nature of the entire system,
which, instead of being, as the earliest observers thought it, a solid
ring or series of concentric rings, is composed of innumerable small
bodies, like meteorites, perhaps, in size, circulating independently but
in comparatively close juxtaposition to one another about Saturn, and
presenting to our eyes, because of their great number and of our
enormous distance, the appearance of solid, uniform rings. So a flock of
ducks may look from afar like a continuous black line or band, although
if we were near them we should perceive that a considerable space
separates each individual from his neighbors.

The fact that this is the constitution of Saturn's rings can be
confidently stated because it has been mathematically proved that they
could not exist if they were either solid or liquid bodies in a
continuous form, and because the late Prof. James E. Keeler demonstrated
with the spectroscope, by means of the Doppler principle, already
explained in the chapter on Venus, that the rings circulate about the
planet with varying velocities according to their distance from Saturn's
center, exactly as independent satellites would do.

It might be said, then, that Saturn, instead of having nine satellites
only, has untold millions of them, traveling in orbits so closely
contiguous that they form the appearance of a vast ring.