New-York tribune., 1873-02-08
COMETS And METEORS.

1t is time that this business of comets was
settled. 1t is very interesting to be told that
there are magnesium, and iron, and hydrogen
in the sun and in some of the stars. But there
is nothing personal about such facts. We
shall never get enough calcined magnesia, or
puddled iron, or pure hydrogen from sun or
star to make dose of physc, L rail, or a
toy balloon. We may not be sure of our dis
tance from those objects by a few milliOu
miles more or less, but we are quite
certain that they are, and will remain,
quite far enough away for safety. But a comet
is a different thing. We admit that Planta-
mour never said what was attributed to him.
We allow the correctness of calculations that
show a fraction with long row of ciphers in
the denOminatOr as the indefinite chance of
being struck by a comet But since it is an
nounced that comets are liable to disintegrate
into an innumerabe crowd Of meteOrs, we per-
ceive new element in the chances. 1t is pos
sble to dodge bombshell, but not grape and
canister.
There is an easy-g0ing unanimity about
these men of science in accepting the new
theory that Bieas comet has gone to pieces,
and that its place is occupied by train of
meteOrs which is very remarkable. The cal
culations made in England accord with those
of our own observers; and the results OBJ
tanned by the astronomers of Italy who saw
80, 400 meteors in six hours on the night of
Nov. 81, all point to the same origin. 1t would
be tedious to name all the authorities whose
adhesion is given to the belief that these mete-
ors are the missing comet but the Italian let
ters published by our Naval Observatory
and the English scientific journals all speak of
this as if no longsg open to question. We
have not told the worst of it; it is the head,
not the tail, of the comet which supplies the
shower. 1t is from his horrid hair that he
shakes meteors, if not pestilence and war.
The thickness of this stratum of meteors, A. s.
Herschel writes, is about $4,000 miles. We
should say that in a storm of thaS size, rain
ing fire-balls at the rate of 300 a minute, it
would need great deal of mathematics to
preserve equanimity.
But what we want TO know is, have these
scientific gentlemen been lulling us to slumber
all this time with false pretensesf They we
taught us to laugh at the Pope's bull against
the comet, but they are not themselves safe
from the horns of dilemma. The beautiful
cOmetic machinery which DIR. Dick used TO
describe with prophetic vision, whereby the
end of the world was to be accomplished, had
at least the merit of solid consistency. But
here for years past the astronomers have been
assuring us that comets were thin, vaporous,
intangible masses, which could MT hurt us if
they hit us. Bielas comet in particular was
not only transparent. it was gaseous The
tail was thinner than the head and the head
well, if one must be exact-was the vapor of
carbon. There was still a little difficulty about
it nobody exactly knew how this vapor kept
up its luminous character in the cold regions
of space, but as there were some thousand
square miles of it, perhaps it was slowly con-
densing. Let that go. Shooting stars, bohdes,
meteors, aerolites, we do know something
about. Some Of them actually fall on earth
and hit hard-there is even known case
where one killed man. These, we
find, contain iron. nickel and few