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Every effort had been made to so adjust the electric charge upon the ships that they would be repelled from the cometic mass, but, owing apparently to electric changes affecting the clashing mass of meteoric bodies which constituted the head of the comet, we found it impossible to escape from its influence.
Sects rise up every now and then which carry their abhorrence of all that is not fanaticism after their own pattern to the extreme, and which lay pleasure under the same curse with vice; but sects are cometic, and are not to be judged of after the generalisations of national character. Practically, we find that rigidness and vice, amusements and morality, go together, Siamese-like.
We can understand that, while several have been found who have applauded the sea-bird paradox for what it might do in explaining comets' tails, its advocates have as yet not done much to reconcile it with cometic observation. The latest astronomical paradox published is perhaps still more startling.
Most probably, much of the matter that is thus thrown off from the cometic nucleus is never collected again, but is dissipated into space, and lost for ever to the comet. The tail of the comet of 1680 was seen in its greatest brilliancy soon before the solar approach; this was, however, an exception to the general rule.
The great peculiarity of cometic paths, as compared with the planetary ones, is, that they consist of ellipses of very much more eccentric proportions; and that, therefore, the bodies moving in them, go alternately to much greater and less distances from the sun than the planets do. It must not be imagined, however, that all comets revolve about the sun even in the most lengthened ellipses.
It had simply been announced that Lalande would read before the Academy of Sciences a paper entitled 'Reflections on those Comets which can approach the Earth. That was absolutely all; yet, from that one fact, not only were vague rumours of approaching cometic troubles spread abroad, but the statement was definitely made that on May 20 or 21, 1773, 'a comet would encounter the earth. So great was the fear thus excited, that, in order to calm it, Lalande inserted in the 'Gazette de France' of May 7, 1773, the following advertisement: 'M. Lalande had not time to read his memoir upon comets which may approach the earth and cause changes in her motions; but he would observe that it is impossible to assign the epochs of such events.
In this respect it resembles air as much as cloud the blueness of the sky is the sunlit air seen through the lower and inner strata of itself. In the same way, the whiteness of the comet is sunlit vapour seen through portions of itself. The sunbeams pass as readily through the entire thickness of the cometic substance as they do through our own highly permeable atmosphere.
A board of bank directors was hesitating about a bill for L.100, some thinking it rather indifferent paper, others viewing it more favourably; when down comes the cometic flood, and while the manager rings his bell to see what is the matter, it enters by doors and windows, and in an instant closes the whole concern.
He came running down with him to the water's edge, gave Emmeline the child, unmoored the boat, and started out from shore. The sculls, as far as they were immersed, were like bars of glistening silver; under them passed the fish, leaving cometic tails; each coral clump was a lamp, lending its lustre till the great lagoon was luminous as a lit-up ballroom.
Judging from the evidence we have on the subject, the process of the formation of the solar system was one which involved the utilisation of cometic and meteoric matter; and it fortunately so chanced that the comets likely otherwise to have been most mischievous those, namely, which crossed the track of planets, and still more those whose paths intersected the globe of the sun were precisely those which would be earliest and most thoroughly used up in this way.
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