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Although this woman has eluded me I have studied her conditions and perturbances as astronomers conjecture the orbits of planets they have never seen. if she exists, she is probably neither an artist nor a woman with a mission, but an obscure personage, with imperative intellectual needs, who absorbs rather than produces."
It is true that a mass of matter driven from the sun cannot be exactly compared to a globe which touches its surface, for the impulse which the particles of this mass receive from one another and the reciprocal attractions which they exert among themselves, could, in changing the direction of their movements, remove their perihelions from the sun; but their orbits would be always most eccentric, or at least they would not have slight eccentricities except by the most extraordinary chance.
Once more, considering the comparative insignificance of Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury, it follows that, the diminishing circumferences of the rings not sufficing to account for the smallness of the resulting masses, the rings must have been slender ones must have again approximated to the hoop-shaped; and thus it happens that the planes of rotation again diverge more or less widely from those of the orbits.
It is now known that comets are not wanderers through the celestial spaces from star to star, but must always have belonged to our system. But their orbits are so very elongated that thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of years are required for a revolution.
Through the second heaven He passed, where the wonderful stars, the creation of His own power, describe their great orbits around their fiery suns. He is still attended by angels, and the angelic hosts beheld Him, who were also the witnesses of His sufferings, His death and resurrection. At last a place was reached where every angel had to halt.
The Greeks, for example, conceived that the circle is the perfect body, and that the universe is perfect; therefore, sun and moon must be perfect spheres or disks, and all the orbits of the heavenly bodies must be exactly circular. We have seen that this metaphysical conception, dominating the world for many centuries, exerted a constantly hampering influence upon the progress of science.
It had been objected to the Copernican theory that, if the planets Mercury and Venus move round the sun in orbits interior to that of the earth, they ought to show phases like those of the moon; and that in the case of Venus, which is so brilliant and conspicuous, these phases should be very obvious.
Moreover, since a body thus affected should necessarily return at each revolution to the scene of encounter, the same process of retardation may, in some cases, have been repeated many times, until the more restricted cometary orbits were reduced to their present dimensions.
All that is or ever will be in nature, all that we men feel, think or do, all is dependent on eternal and immutable causes; and these causes have each their Daimon who interposes between us and the divinity and is symbolized in golden characters on the vault of heaven. The letters are the stars, whose orbits are as unchanging and everlasting as are the first causes of all that exists or happens."
He noticed that Newton ascribed parabolic orbits to the comets which he studied, so that they come from infinity, sweep round the sun, and go off to infinity for ever, after having been visible a few weeks or months. He collected all the reliable observations of comets he could find, to the number of twenty-four, and computed their parabolic orbits by the rules laid down by Newton.
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