The seasons on Saturn are somewhat like ours in the succession of
spring, summer, autumn, and winter; but the inclination of its axis
to its orbit being twenty-seven degrees instead of twenty-three and a
half, as ours is, each season is much more accentuated than ours. The
sun climbs higher during the northern summer, and sinks correspondingly
lower during the winter. But in length Saturn’s seasons are very
different from ours. Like his year, they are about twenty-nine and
one-half times as long as ours. Each one is more than seven years long.
Even the agreeable seasons might grow monotonous to one in that time;
but to be spinning through the rapidly alternating days and nights of
Saturn during seven long years of winter is a situation that one does
not care to contemplate. It is with world personalities as with human
personalities: however much we may admire their superior grandeur, when
we consider details we would not change places with them.
The symbol of Saturn is an ancient scythe (♄), which gets its
appropriateness from the fact that the deity of that name was the
special protector of agriculture.