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Many of the formularies by which we still express our religious beliefs date from periods when comets and eclipses were believed to have been sent to portend calamity; when every great meteorological change was attributed to some isolated spiritual agency; when witchcraft and diabolical possession, supernatural diseases, and supernatural cures were deemed indubitable facts: and when accounts of contemporary miracles, Divine or Satanic, carried with them no sense of strangeness or improbability.
Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination.
But this sort of ingenuity is but a mere trifle in comparison with the other talents of such men." "It must have been beautiful," said Edward, "to spend whole nights in a high tower as Newton did, gazing at the stars, and the comets, and the meteors. But what would Newton have done had he been blind? or if his eyes had been no better than mine?" "Why, even then, my dear child," observed Mrs.
He was exceedingly superstitious; in his eye the most ordinary natural phenomenon was a demonstration of the occult. No matter that the advanced science of his time explained rainfall, unusual heat or cold, over-fruitful or unproductive years, pestilence and sudden death, eclipses, comets and meteors, he believed them to be the direct results of sorcery.
Had we done so, we had not been so willing to incur the danger of falling. All I discern is, that, by the signs and comets in the heavens, something dreadful is about to happen something very strange, treacherous, and bloody; and that Gan has a seat ready prepared for him in hell." "Within three days," cried the enchanter, loudly, "fetch Rinaldo and Ricciardetto into the pass of Roncesvalles.
However, it was refuted in 1872 by the able physicist, Friedrich Zollner, of Leipzig, in his work, On the Nature of Comets. He showed clearly how unscientific this hypothesis is; firstly in point of logic, and secondly in point of scientific content.
No wonder, if this be true, that we have so many women of taste, cultivation, and often brilliant intellectual powers, blazing about like comets or shooting stars in our social firmament.
Herschel finished his observations of a comet that was visible in January, 1807, with the following remark: "Of the sixteen telescopic comets that I have examined, fourteen had no solid body visible at their centre; the other two exhibited a central light, very ill defined, that might be termed a nucleus, but a light that certainly could not deserve the name of a disk."
Small comets, such as we call meteorites, were picked up on the surface of the moon and put to this practical use. This medicine, administered as an hypodermic injection, produced wonderful effects, the patient, although afflicted with the most quarrelsome disposition, becoming as mild and harmless as a lamb.
It may now be asked, what were the conclusions regarding the nature of comets drawn by astronomers from the considerable amount of novel experience accumulated during the first half of this century? The first and best assured was that the matter composing them is in a state of extreme tenuity.
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