Saturn
Saturn names 2 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Saturn the most remote of the planets known to the ancients
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
the most remote of the planets known to the ancients. Its orbit is outside of that of Jupiter. Its distance from the sun is 9 1/2, its surface 84, its volume 768, its diameter 9, its mass 95 times that of the earth. A mass of 100 on the earth would weigh about 120 on the surface of Saturn. Its day is ten hours and fourteen seconds in length, giving a high rotary velocity. Its density is only two-thirds that of water, indicating in part, at least, a gaseous condition. The most remarkable feature of Saturn is that it is surrounded by three enormous whirling rings with a common center, that is to say, one outside of another, as though they had been cut from one sheet of material fifty miles in thickness. These rings are apparently made up of a swarm of small particles, possibly no larger than those of a dust storm. Saturn has eight or possibly nine moons. The largest of these moons is Titan. The ninth moon, Phoebe, has never been seen in the telescope, but it has been photographed. It has been suggested that the rings may some day collect into additional satellites. See Bode; Planets
Saturn an ancient divinity of the Romans
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an ancient divinity of the Romans, identified at an early date with Kronos or Chronos of the Greeks, with whom, too late to save the potato from going under however, he had little in common. Saturn was believed to have appeared in Italy during the reign of Janus, and was the god who led the Romans out of the chaos of barbarism into civilization by interesting the people in the arts of husbandry and gardening. Harvest-home festivals, called Saturnalia, held in December in honor of Saturn, were scenes of rustic revelry and mirth. Later, the Saturnalia became noted as seasons of general debauch, and the term is now one of reproach. As compared with lively, quick Mercury, Saturn was dull and phlegmatic. A saturnine face, therefore, is one adjudged gloomy, dull, sluggish, or uninteresting. Saturday or Saturn's day is named in honor of this divinity. See Cronus
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote this in 1910, Saturn had "eight or possibly nine moons" and three rings thought to be cut from a sheet "fifty miles in thickness." Spacecraft have transformed both counts: Pioneer 11 flew past in 1979, Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1980-81, and the Cassini orbiter circled Saturn from 2004 until it was deliberately flown into the planet on 15 September 2017. Cassini resolved the rings into thousands of ringlets only tens of metres thick in places, watched water-ice geysers erupt from the moon Enceladus, and in January 2005 dropped the Huygens probe onto Titan, which proved to have a thick atmosphere and lakes of liquid methane. The known satellites now number in the hundreds rather than the nines. The mythological account, by contrast, still reads as it did in 1910.
Written for this edition, 2026.