The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1881-11-12
Comets.

directed renewed attention to these GU
rious members of the universe. A great
authority, Mr.. Hind, has just published
some investigations upon the comet
named after Haley, by which he con-
firms the belief that this particular body
really does revisit and circumnavigate
the sun every seventy-tive or seventy
SIX years. This was pretty surely uil-
derstood before, but recent historical
notices establish the fact, and those who
live so long may count on seeing Hal
ley's comet about A. ID. 1910. 1t will
on that occasion come very close, in.
deed, to the earth, ten times closer than
at its last appearance, in 1885, closer
even than in 1856, when it almost
frightened Europe and Pope Callixtus
out of their wits. But nobody now en-
tertains any fear of comets, partly by
reason of the information afforded by
science, and partly, no doubt, because
familiarity breeds-if not exactly con-
tempt-a feeling akin to indifference.
Yet we should no more show disrespect
to comets than to the equator. They re.
main mysterious and wonderful, though
they have ceased to be dangerous, and
If people nowadays lightly speculate
upon good vintage because there have
! appeared four of these " tailed stars"
or at worst put down the bad weather
to their influence, this same Halley's
comet reminds us of the painful nerv-
BUSINESS of our ancestors. In B. C. 70
it swept through the sky, and was be-
lieved by the trembling Romans to be
the soul of Julius Caesar, foreboding
death and ruin. In A. D. 1877 it became
visible during Holy Week, and so
alarmed Louis the Debonnaire that he
passed the night in religious services,
and spent thousands of crowns in ex.
piatory masses. In 989 its appearance
was taken as so certain sign that the
world would come to an end at the close
of the thousand years that legal docu-
ments used to begin: "Now that the
contamination of things approached.
The comet came again in A. D. 1866,
just before the Norman invasion of En-
gland, aud the Bayeux tapestries rep
resent King Harold and his English peo-
pie gazing in horror and dismay upon
its fiery nucleus and streaming tail, to
which general opinion confidently at
tributed afterward the catastrophe of
the Battle of Hastings. Pope Urban
~. died in July, 1914, and his death
was put down to the comet then show
ing, but in June 1856, Halley's'' wild
wanderer was so near, so brilliant and
so big that all Christendom was
troubled, and Pope Enthusiastically
northumberland it with much
perturbation of mind, to be vision of
the cross; while the Saracen Sultan
proclaimed that it was "the scimitar of
Mahomet" presaging victory. On that
date the comet showed train more
than sixty degrees long; and was nearly
as terrible when it returned in 1927,
quitting many into so great fright
that they died, and making others
sick" Imaginative minds saw upon
this phenomenon figures of weapons
and decapitated heads; hens are said to
have laid eggs with a picture of the
comet on their shells, and persons of
high rank took the warning of such
bodies deeply to heart-as if heaven
cared so much for rank and title. The
brother of Louis XIV, when a comet
came suddenly and the courtiers were
discussing the monitions of the portent
with skepticism, exclaimed with sigh:
"Ah, gentleman. you can talk at your
ease if you like; you are not Kings and
Princes"
If. however, mankind has ceased to
fear these ethereal pilgrims, it can not
but marvel at the one species of heaven
ly bodies which thus fly from universe
to universe. Comets must have
business and function of some sort.
Something or other, important to all
the planets which they skirt upon their
flight must result from their proximity
and passage There is, indeed, already
moral to their tail I" in the exploded
absurlity of the belief that they come
to portend the demise of great men, or
some natural catastrophe. Shakespeare
puts such an idea into the mouth of
Calphurnia, "When beggars die there
are no portents seen. The heavens
themselves blaze forth the death of
Princes" We measure the vain igno-
rance of our race when we dwell upon
the bygone superstitions that Halley's
comet could travel 3,200,000,000 of
miles to betoken Pope's decease or
the landing of William the Conqueror.
Yet will the earth and its inhabitants
have got rid of all such foolish notions
when this same silver roamer among
the worlds returns in May, 1910? 1t
is but slowly that human beings have
learned that the universe was not crea-
ted to furnish spangled curtain at
night for them. Very few have been
the ethereal journeys made by Halley's
comet since it was capital offense
against the church for Gallileo to pro-
claim that the sun did not go round
this infinitesimal ball, and could not be
stayed, therefore, at Ajalon or else
where. Men have changed these mar
row and egotistical views for concep-
tons of the world of life and light less
fattering to ourselves, but infinitely
more full of splendid possibilities of ex-
istence and boundless developments Of
creative power and glory. Many and
many another illusion-derived from
the feeble and deceitful senses-abides
with us, at which perhaps generations
to come will smile, as we do at Harold
on the Bayeux tapestries and Pope Cal
lixtus exercising the comet. Thirty
years, even at the present rate of scien-
tifc and social progress, may work a
considerable difference in the thoughts