San Andreas independent., 1857-05-30
The Comet quite Harmless.

We visited, says the editor or the San
Francisco Herald, Musical Hall to hear
Mr. Minus lecture on Comets, on We'd
nesday evening, and came away well salts
fed that the comet expected on the 18th
OF June is of pacific disposition, and
will not harm our globe in the least
There was an intelligent audience present,
and the lecturer, by the many authorities
from which he quoted, proved himself
well read in astronomy He said that
nearly all the most celebrated astronomers
believed comets to be nothing more than
vapor of the thinnest kind, and illumi-
mated by the rays of the sun. The
belief that they were hard bodies of fire,
capable of sweeping away any planet with
which they might come in contact, had its
foundation in ignorance and superstition,
rather than scientific demonstrations. Sir
Isaac Newton thought that if there were
hundreds of thousands of miles of the tail
of comet compressed into square inch,
it would not be as dense as an inch of our
atmosphere and Sir John Herschel saw
constellation of stars through $4,000
miles of comet. Therefore it is impos-
sible for a comet to penetrate the atmos-
phere which surrounds our globe. The
atmosphere is to man what water is to fish,
There are two great classes of fsh-those
that swim near to the surface, and those
that crawl on the bottom, as oysters and
Holsters. In the atmosphere birds might
be compared to the swimming fish, while
men and beasts crawl on the bottom Now
it was just as likely that cloud of vapor
lowering on the ocean, could injure the
oysters and Holsters at the bottom, as that
comet could injure the inhabitants of the
earth. The best authority about the ad-
vent of the coming comet was Baum, the
great German astronomer, and his calcu-
lations, after years of study, do not enable
him to positively assert the time more
definitely than inside of the given years
namely, from August 1858, to the same
month in 1860. The reason of this ina
bility to calculate the advent of this comet
to month or day is, that it only makes
its appearance once in three hundred years;
it was seen in the year 1900, and again in
! 1900, when its tail was something like
one hundred millions of miles in length;
and it is from the calculations and obser-
vatlons of these remote periods, when sci
entific instruments had not arrived at as
great perfection as now, that our astron-
omers have to make their calculations
When this comet does make its appearance
the people will have grand sight In
case comet should strike the earth, the
most that could ensue from it would be to
see the heavens filled with what are COM
monty called shooting stars. Comets in-
crease in velocity as they near the sun,
and decrease so much as scarcely to move
when they get as far from it as astronomers
have any knowledge That comets are
not self-luminous, but lighted by refec-
tions from the suns rays, is supposed to
} be proven from the fact that they become
dim as they recede from the sun, whereas
self luminous bodies never lose their
brightness; they decrease in size by dis
tance, but shine just as brightly so long
as they can be seen 1t was very proba-
bic that our globe had frequently passed
through the tails of comets without know
ing it, and they might, by coming between
us and the sun, though so thin as not to
be perceived, have caused the slight chan
ges in our seasons observable from time to
time; but that their collision with the
earth could do no harm, was nearly demon
strable from the fact that one of the great
est comets that ever was seen was entan-
gled for months among some of the planets
whose orbits are nearest the sun, without
disaTanging those bodies in the least.