—Bailey.
Later the side features reappeared and became larger and larger, until they fitted the globe "like a pair of handles."
This drawing shows the rings of Saturn opened to their fullest extent, as seen on July 7, 1898, by Prof. E. E. Barnard through the 40-inch refractor at the Yerkes Observatory.
The drawings of those days look very strange to us now, for some pictured a bar run through the planet or a ball with ears. Fifty years later, in 1656, Huygens, with his 123-foot tubeless telescope, solved the mystery and proved the existence of a thin, disconnected ring, which was as astounding a phenomenon as the ears or bars or handles.
Proof by direct observation that the ring was neither liquid nor solid but a multitude of very small bodies journeying close together, was made by Professor Keeler when he applied the spectroscope to determine the velocity at which the rings rotate. It was then discovered that the inner parts revolved more rapidly than the outer parts and the only way in which such a phenomenon can be explained is to accept the hypothesis that the rings are composed of separate independent bodies.
Every 15 years the plane of the ring passes through the plane of the earth and hence it is seen edgewise to the earth. It then almost disappears, being so thin as to be seen only in the larger telescopes.
