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LS**etsa,e-•nifv-1-7isleeLd1-h;o13dal-fhI-tifDComets.In a year which has witnessed nofewer than four distinct come** it is notsurprising that astronomers vhould have directed renewed attention to these curious members of the universe. A great authority, Mr. Hind, has just published some investigations upon the comet named after Hailey, by which he confirms the belief that this particular body really does revisit and circumnavigate the sun every seventy-five or seventy-six years. This was pretty surely understood before, but recent historical notices establish the fact, and those who live so long may count on seeing Hailey’s comet about A. D. 1910. It will on that occasion come very close, indeed, to the earth, ten times closer than at its last appearance, in 1835, closer even than in 1456, when it almost frighteued Europe and Pope Callixtus out of their wits. But nobody now entertains any fear of eomets, partly by reason of the information afforded by science, and partly, no doubt, because familiarity breeds—if not exactly contempt—a feeling akin to indifference. Yet we should no more show disrespect to comets than to the equator. They remain mysterious and wonderful, though they have ceased to be dangerous, and if people nowadays lightly speculate upon a good vintage because there have appeared four of these “ tailed stars.” or at worst put down the bad weather to their influence, this same Hailey’s comet reminds’'iis 6f the painful nervousness of our ancestors. In B. C. 12 it swept through the sky, and was believed by the trembling Romans to be the soul of Julius Craaar, foreboding death and ruin. In A. D. 837 it became visible during Holy Week, and so alarmed Louis the Debonnairo that he passed the night in religious services, and ipent thousands of crowns in expiatory masses. In 989 its appearance was taken as so certain a sign that the world would come to an end at the close of the thousand years that legal documents used to begin: ‘‘Now that the 9 consummation of things approacheth.”I The comet came agaiu in A. D. 1036, just before the Norman invasion of England, and the Bayeur tapestries represent King Harold and his English people gazing in horror and dismay upon its fiery nucleus and streaming tail, u which general opinion confidently at tributed afterward the catastrophe o the Battle of Hastings. Pope Urban IV. died in July, 1214, and his deatl t- was put down to the oorar*t then show ing, but in June 1456, •• Hailey’s” wilt wanderer was so near, so brilliant anc so big that all Christendom was troubled, and Pope Callixtus—already mentioned—declared it with muci perturbation of mind, to be a vision o: the cross; while the Saracen Sultan6reclaimed that it was - the scimitar o lahomot” presaging victory. On that date the comet showed a train more than sixty degrees long; and was nearh as terrible when it returned in 15*7,V putting many into so great a fright fliat .they died, and making other: *dicfc.” Imaginative minds saw upor this phenomenon figures of weapons and decapitated heads; hens are said to have laid eggs with a picture of the comet on their sholls, and persons of fhigh rank took the warning of such •foies deeply to lieart—as if heaven cared so much for rank and title. The brother of Louis XIV., when a cornel came suddenly and the courtiers were discussing the monitions of the portent with skepticism, exclaimed with a sigh: “.Ah, gentleman, you can, talk at your ease if you Hike; you are not Kings and Princes.”If,, however, mankind has ceased t fear these dflieteal'pilgrims, it can no but marvel at the one species of heaven ly bodies whici* thus fly from univ^raeto uhiverse. Cftfiitts must have ibusiness and function of some sort Something or other, important to al the planets which they skirt upon theii flight must result from their nroximitj and passage. There is, indeed, alreadj a ••moral to their tail” in the exploderabsurdity of the belief that they cometo portend the demise of great men, oi some natural catastrophe. Shakespeare puts such an ide* into the mouth ol Calphurnia, -When beggars die there are no portents seen. The heaven! themselves blase forth the death ol Princes.” We measure the vain in* ranee of our race when we dwell upon the bygone superstitions that Hailey1! comet could travel 3,2* )0,000.000 olo:miles to betoken a Pope’s decease v the landing of William the Connueroi Yet will the earth and its inhabitant have got rid of all such foolish notion when this same silver roamer am on the worlds returns in May, 1910? 1 is but slowly that human beings hv learned that the universe was not crea Jed to furnish a spangled curtain r night for them.* Very few have bee the ethereal journeys made by Hailey’ comet since it was a capital offens •gainst the church for Gallileo to pro claim that the sun did not go roum this infinitesimal ball, and could not b stayed, therefore, at Ajalpn or else where. Men have changed these nar row and lt;£otistical views for con cep tions of the world of life and light las flattering to ourselves, bat infinitel more full of splendid possibilities of ex istenoe and boundless developments o creative power and glory. Manv am radnr another illusiod—derived ” fron the. feeble and deceitful senses—abide, with us, at which perhaps generation to come will smile, as we do at Harolt on tho Bayenx tapestries and Pope Cal lixtus exorcising the comet ThirU years, even at the present rate of scion tilie and social progress, may work i considerable difference in the thought and beliefs of men; and those who gaze in 1910 on the returning prodigy wii see some strange altowfctionjvperohance What they will be who knows’ but thi same firmly-fixed law of order whicl controls every learn* in the spaskliiu sweep of these wild wanderers—*o tbai thejr dates can be foreseen with per/ec accuracy—justifies the faith that lifi and nature move everywhere towarc boundless development of * good, ant that those are wisest who hope and be iieve most—London Telegram.
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The Bossier Banner
Bellevue, Louisiana, US
Thu, Dec 01, 1881
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USA 11 Oct 2022
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