ions, as well as those made soon after by Hevelius, though
wrongly interpreted, were correct enough. Nay, we know that if either
Galileo or Hevelius had been at the pains to reason out the meaning of
the alternate visibility and disappearance of objects looking like
attendant planets, they must have anticipated the discovery made in 1656
by Huyghens, that Saturn's globe is girdled about by a thin flat ring so
vast that, if a score of globes like our earth were set side by side,
the range of that row of worlds would be less than the span of the
Saturnian ring system.

There is a reference in Galileo's letter to the solar spots; 'Are the
two lesser stars,' he says, 'consumed after the manner of the solar
spots?' When he thus wrote the spots were among the myths or fables of
astronomy, and an explanation was offered, by those who did not reject
them utterly, which has taken its place among forsaken doctrines, those
broken toys of astronomers. It is said that when Scheiner, himself a
Jesuit, communicated to the Provincial of the Jesuits his discovery of
the spots on the sun, the latter, a staunch Aristotelian, cautioned him
not to see these things. 'I have read Aristotle's writings from
beginning to end many times,' he said, 'and I can assure you I have
nowhere found in them anything similar to what you mention' [amazing
circumstances!] 'Go, therefore, my son, tranquillise yourself; be
assured that what you take for spots on the sun are the faults of your
glasses or your eyes.' As the idea was obviously inadmissible that a
celestial body could be marked by spots, the theory was started that the
dark objects apparently seen on the sun's body were in reality small
planets revolving round the sun, and a contest arose for the possession
of these mythical planets. Tarde maintained that they should be called
_Astra Borbonia_, in honour of the royal family of France; but C.
Malapert insisted that they should be called _Sidera Austriaca_.
Meantime the outside world laughed at the spots, and their names, and
the astronomers who were thought to have invented both. 'Fabritius puts
only three spots,' wrote Burton in his 'Anatomy of Melancholy,' 'and
those in the sun; Apelles 15, and those without the sun, floating like
the Cyanean Isles in the Euxine Sea. Tarde the Frenchman hath observed
33, and those neither spots nor clouds as Galileus supposed, but planets
concentric with the sun, and not far from him, with regular motions.
Christo