Comets as Portents. BY RICHARD A. PROCTOR. The blazing star, Threat'ning the world with famine, plague, and war; To all estates inevitable losses; To herdsmen rot; to ploughmen hapless seasons; ALTHOUGH Comets are no longer regarded with superstitious awe as in old times, mystery still clings to them. Astronomers can tell what path a comet is travelling upon, and say whence it has come and whither it will go, can even in many cases predict the periodic returns of a comet, can analyse the substance of these strange wanderers, and have recently discovered a singular bond of relationship between comets and those other strange visitants from the celestial depths, the shooting stars. But astronomy has hitherto proved unable to determine the origin of comets, the part they perform in the economy of the universe, their real structure, the causes of the marvellous changes of shape which they undergo as they approach the sun, rush round him, and then retreat. As Sir John Herschel has remarked: No one, hitherto, has been able to assign any single point in which we should be a bit better or worse off, materially speaking, if there were no such thing as a comet. Persons, even thinking persons, have busied themselves with conjectures; such as that they may serve for fuel for the sun (into which, however, they never fall), or that they may cause warm summers, which is a mere fancy, or that they may give rise to epidemics, or potato-blights, and so forth.' And though, as he justly says, this is all wild talking,' yet it will probably continue until astronomers have been able to master the problems respecting comets which hitherto have foiled their best efforts. The unexplained has ever been and will ever be marvellous to the general mind. Just as unexplained regions of the earth have been tenanted in imagination by anthropophagi and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders, so do wondrous possibilities exist in the unknown and the illunderstood phenomena of nature. In old times, when the appearance and movements of comets were supposed to be altogether uncontrolled by physical laws, it was natural that comets should be regarded as signs from heaven, tokens of Divine wrath towards some, and of the interposition of Divine providence in favour of others. As Seneca well remarked: 'There is no man so dull, so obtuse, so turned to earthly things, who does not direct all the powers of his mind towards things Divine when some novel phenomenon appears in the heavens. While all follows its usual course up yonder, familiarity robs the spectacle of its grandeur. For so are men made. However wonderful may be what he sees day after day, he looks on it with indifference; while matters of very little importance attract and interest him if they depart from the accustomed order. The host of heavenly constellations beneath the vault of heaven whose beauty they adorn, attract no attention; but if any unusual appearance be noticed among them, at once all eyes are turned heavenwards. The sun is only looked on with interest when he is undergoing eclipse. Men observe the moon only under like conditions. . . So thoroughly is it a part of our nature to admire the new rather than the great. The same is true of comets. When one of these fiery bodies of unusual form appears everyone is eager to know what it means; men forget other objects to inquire about the new arrival; they know not whether to wonder or to tremble; for many spread fear on all sides, drawing from the phenomenon most grave prognostics.' There is no direct reference to comets in the Bible, either in the Old Testament or the New. It is possible that some of the signs from heaven recorded in the Bible pages were either comets or meteors, and that even where in some places an angel or messenger from God is said to have appeared and delivered a message, what really happened was that some remarkable phenomenon in the heavens was interpreted in a particular manner by the priests, and the interpretation afterwards described as the message of an angel. The image of the flaming sword which turned every way' may have been derived from a comet; but we can form no safe conclusion about this, any more than we can upon the question whether the horror of great darkness' which fell upon Abraham (Genesis Iv. 12) when the sun was going down was caused by an eclipse;' or whether the going back of the shadow upon the dial of Ahaz A gentleman, whose acquaintance I made in returning from America last spring, assured me that he had found demonstrative evidence showing that a total eclipse of the moon then occurred; for he could prove that Abraham's vision occurred at the time of full moon, so that it could not otherwise have been dark when the sun went down (v. 17). But the horror of great darkness occurred when the sun was going down, and total eclipses of the moon do not behave that way—at least, in our time. was caused by a mock sun. The star seen by the wise men from the east may have been a comet, since the word translated 'star' signifies any bright object seen in the heavens, and is in fact the same word which Homer, in a passage frequently referred to, uses to signify either a comet or a meteor. The way in which it appeared to go before them, when (directed by Herod, be it noticed) they went to Bethlehem, almost due south of Jerusalem, would correspond to a meridian culmination low down-for the star had manifestly not been visible in the earlier evening, since we are told that they rejoiced when they saw the star again. It was probably a comet travelling southwards; and, as the wise men had travelled from the east, it had very likely been first seen in the west as an evening star, wherefore its course was retrograde,—that is, supposing it was a comet.1 It may possibly have been an apparition of Halley's comet, following a course somewhat similar to that which it followed in the year 1835, when the perihelion passage was made on November 15, and the comet running southwards disappeared to northern astronomers, though in January it was received' by Sir J. Herschel, to use his own expression, 'in the southern hemisphere.' There was an apparition of Halley's comet in the year 66, or seventy years after the Nativity; and the period of the comet varies, according to the perturbing influences affecting the comet's motion, from sixty-nine to eighty years. Homer does not, to the best of my recollection, refer anywhere directly to comets. Pope, indeed, who made very free with Homer's references to the heavenly bodies, introduces a cometand a red one, too!-into the simile of the heavenly portent in Book IV. : As the red comet from Saturnius sent To fright the nations with a dire portent, It is not easy to understand what else it could have been. The notion that 8 conjunction of three planets, which nearly took place about the time of Christ's birth, gave rise to the tradition of the star in the east, though propounded by a former president of the Astronomical Society, could hardly be entertained by an astronomer, unless he entirely rejected Matthew's account, which the author of this theory (the Rev. Charles Pritchard), being a clergyman, can scarcely have done. 2 As, for instance, when he makes Homer say of the moon that Around her throne the vivid planets roll, And stars unnumbered gild the glowing pole. It is difficult, indeed, to understand how so thorough an astronomer as the late Admiral Smyth could have called the passage in which these lines occur one of the finest bursts of poetry in our language, except on the principle wittily cited by Waller when Charles II. upbraided him for the warmth of his panegyric on Cromwell, that 'poets succeed better with fiction than with truth.' Macaulay, though not an astronomer, speaks more justly of the passage in saying that this single passage contains more inaccuracies than can be found in all Wordsworth's Excursion.' |