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Updated: May 21, 2025
Is it not as if one should have, through majestic powers of science, the comets given into his hand, or the planets and their moons, and should draw them from their orbits to glare with the municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in all towns, "very superior pyrotechny this evening!"
Night after night he and Carolina worked together at their silent task he noting the small features with his big telescope, she "sweeping for comets" with a smaller glass or "finder." Herschel could have had no more useful or devoted assistant than his sister, who idolized him with all her heart.
"Doctor!" the physician said, emphatically, "science is knowledge. Nothing that is not known properly belongs to science. Whenever knowledge obliges us to doubt, we are always safe in doubting. Astronomers foretell eclipses, say how long comets are to stay with us, point out where a new planet is to be found.
He found that two particularly bright ones had been carefully noted one about seventy-five years before that which he had seen, and the other seventy-five years before that again. Both these comets had been watched so scientifically that the paths in which they had travelled could be computed. A brilliant inspiration came to Halley.
Starting from this fact, some scientific men have seen in the moon a comet whose orbit will one day bring it so near to the earth that it will be held there by its attraction." "Is there any truth in this hypothesis?" asked Michel. "None whatever," said Barbicane, "and the proof is, that the moon has preserved no trace of the gaseous envelope which always accompanies comets."
"Neptune has one satellite, at a distance of 202,000 miles, which, like those of Uranus, revolves about its primary in an orbit at a considerable angle to his own in five days twenty-one hours. Both Neptune and Uranus are probably dying suns. "Comets of unknown number travel in long elliptical or parabolic orbits round the sun at great velocities.
Whatever may be the position of the comet with regard to the sun, as it circles round him it continually keeps its tail on the off side. This, as we shall soon see, is a fact of capital importance in relation to the probable nature of comets' tails.
It was next inferred that comets and meteors equally have an origin foreign to the solar system, but are drawn into it temporarily by the sun's attraction, and occasionally fixed in it by the backward pull of some planet. But the crowning fact was reserved for the last.
Thus predictions may be made of comets, and all kinds of meteors, inundations, droughts, heats, frosts, earthquakes, fiery eruptions, winds, great rains, the seasons of the year, plagues, epidemic diseases, plenty, famine, wars, seditions, sects, transmigrations of people, and all commotions, or great innovations of things, natural and civil.
The author next treats of the planets, and the periods of their respective revolutions; of the stars, comets, winds, thunder, lightning, and other natural phenomena, concerning all which he delivers the hypothetical notions maintained by the ancients, and mentions a variety of extraordinary incidents which had occurred in different parts of the world.
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