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We have now to give some brief account of one of the most remarkable cometary apparitions on record, and with the single exception of that identified with the name of Halley the most instructive to astronomers.
I am sure they shine with more than reflected light." "We have been in the habit," said Ayrault, "of associating heat with light, but it is obvious there is something far more subtle about cometary light and that of Saturn's rings, both of which seem to have their birth in the intense cold of interplanetary space."
Behind this gaseous spectrum was found a faint continuous spectrum ascribed to the nucleus, which apparently both reflects the sunlight and gives forth the light of a glowing solid or liquid. Subsequently sodium and iron lines were found in cometary spectra.
The question at issue was nothing less than the creation of a new era in cometary astronomy, or the casting of a reproach upon science, the consequences of which it would long continue to feel.
Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of recall.
Difficulties, indeed, were thickening around it; but their discussion was perhaps felt to be premature, and they were permitted to accumulate without debate, until fortified by fresh testimony into unexpected and overwhelming preponderance. Marius himself, however, seems to have held the Aristotelian terrestrial-exhalation theory of cometary origin. Trans., vol. xxvii., p. 274. Ac.
In the frame of mind which these speculations induce not very greatly alarmed about such extraordinary contingencies, yet not insensible to the solemnity of the thought of what may come to pass even before our living eyes it is curious, and not necessarily unpleasant, to consider what might be the actual phenomena attending a cometary collision.
But our interest in cometary orbits has been added to by the discovery that, owing to the causes just cited, a comet, if it does not separate into discrete parts like Biela's, must in time have its parts spread out so as to cover a sensible part of the orbit, and that, when the earth passes through such part of a comet's orbit, a meteor shower is the result.
Literature is a dead art every one writes and reads and no one understands. Religion! Ah! Yes, religion; the world will be a blackened cinder or cometary gas before the love of God is stamped from its heart. But religion and art must go hand in hand.
From the point of view of the importance of finding out the divergence of a cometary orbit from a parabola, its period, and its aphelion distance, this increase of range attains the very highest value.
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