er year the planet was becoming more favourably
placed for observation, while all the time the rings were opening out.
Accordingly it need not surprise us to learn that in 1853 the dark ring
was seen with a telescope less than three inches and a half in aperture.
Even so early as 1851, Mr. Hartnup, observing the planet with a
telescope eight inches and a half in aperture, found that 'the dark ring
could not be overlooked for an instant.'

But while this increase in the distinctness of the dark ring was to be
expected, from the mere fact that the ring was discovered under
relatively unfavourable conditions, yet the fact that Saturn was thus
found to have an appendage of a remarkable character, perfectly obvious
even with moderate telescopic power, was manifestly most surprising.
The planet had been studied for nearly two centuries with telescopes
exceeding in power those with which the dark ring was now perceived.
Some among these telescopes were not only of great power, but employed
by observers of the utmost skill. The elder Herschel had for a quarter
of a century studied Saturn with his great reflectors eighteen inches in
aperture, and had at times turned on the planet his monstrous (though
not mighty) four-feet mirror. Schroeter had examined the dark space
within the inner bright ring for the special purpose of determining
whether the ring-system is really disconnected from the globe. He had
used a mirror nineteen inches in aperture, and he had observed that the
dark space seen on either side of Saturn inside the ring-system not only
appeared dark, but actually darker than the surrounding sky. This was
presumably (though not quite certainly) an effect of contrast only, the
dark space being bounded all round by bright surfaces. If real, the
phenomenon signified that whereas the space outside the ring, where the
satellites of the planet travel, was occupied by some sort of cosmical
dust, the space within the ring-system was, as it were, swept and
garnished, as though all the scattered matter which might otherwise have
occupied that region had been either attracted to the body of the planet
or to the rings.[36] But manifestly the observation was entirely
inconsistent with the supposition that there existed in Schroeter's time
a dark or dusky ring within the bright system. Again, the elder Struve
made the most careful measurement of the whole of the ring-system in
1826, when the system was as well placed for observation a