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It is perhaps unnecessary to say that comets are no more alive than is our own earth, and as for causing the end of the world by collision, there is every reason to believe the earth has been more than once right through a comet's tail, and yet no one except scientific men even discovered it.
A woman leaned wearily against the signpost, her head bowed motionless on her lace and silken bosom. Before her stood a street car, silent, and within but the messenger but glanced and hurried on. A grimy newsboy sat in the gutter with the "last edition" in his uplifted hand: "Danger!" screamed its black headlines. "Warnings wired around the world. The Comet's tail sweeps past us at noon.
We dream of the swish of a comet's tail wiping out organic life on the planet, and we see, as a matter of fact, great natural convulsions, such as the earthquake of Lisbon or the eruption of Mont Pélée, treating human communities just as an elephant might treat an ant-hill. It is this sense of the immeasurable disproportion in things that a pessimist poet has expressed in the well-known sonnet:
"They say, likewise, that the lady's hair is still growing; for, every time they see her, it is longer than before; and that now such is its length and the head-long speed of the horse, that it floats and streams out behind, like one of those curved clouds, like a comet's tail, far up in the sky; only the cloud is white, and the hair dark as night.
The hypothesis also falls in with the researches of Bredichin, who has divided the tails of comets into three principal classes viz.: Those which appear as long, straight rays; Those which have the form of curved plumes or scimitars; Those which are short, brushy, and curved sharply backward along the comet's path.
Morgan's Library, take for granted that any girl so fond of society, so fashionable in dress and appointments, and with such a comet's tail of admirers, must owe her position with its large salary to "pull," and that it is probably a sinecure anyway. Little they know.
With the dome windows battened tightly, we lifted from the landing stage and soared over the glowing city. The phosphorescence of the electronic tubes was like a comet's tail behind us as we slid upward. At six A.M., Earth Eastern time, which we were still carrying, Snap Dean and I were alone in his instrument room, perched in the network over the Planetara's deck.
I should be burned and rent to pieces amid the terrors of its perihelion passage, and my fragments would be strewn along the comet's orbit, to become, in course of time, particles in a swarm of aerolites. Perchance, through the effects of some unforeseen perturbation, the earth might encounter that swarm. Thus only could I ever return to the bosom of my mother planet.
The belief in the comet's surpassing thinness and lightness is not a mere speculative opinion. It rests upon incontrovertible proof. In 1770, Lexell's Comet passed within six times the moon's distance of the earth, and was considerably retarded in its motion by the terrestrial attraction.
The real diameter of the same comet's nebulosity is observed to contract rapidly as it approaches the sun, and dilate with equal rapidity in its departure towards its aphelion.
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