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Read Ebook: Comet Lore: Halley's Comet in History and Astronomy by Emerson Edwin
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Ebook has 498 lines and 50422 words, and 10 pages
PAGE Halley's Comet 7 The Terror of the Comet 10 Famous Comets of Olden Times 30 The Star of Bethlehem 39 Great Events and Disasters Linked with Comets 42 Halley's Comet the Bloodiest of All 60 The Story of Edmund Halley 90 What Are Comets? 101 Our Peril from Collision with the Comet 113 The End of the World 122
PAGE Cover Designs by William Stevens Halley's Comet of 1910 Frontispiece The Terror of the Comet in Antiquity 13 The Terror of the Comet in Mediaeval Times 20 The Terror of the Comet at the Present Day 25 The Latest Photograph of the Comet of 1910 28 Napoleon's Comet of 1811 53 The Great Comet of 1843 56 Comet of Tel-el-Kebir, 1882 59 Halley's Comet of 1835 62 Halley's Comet of 1682 69 Halley's Comet of 1066 in the Bayeux Tapestry 78 William the Conqueror, an English Dream 81 Portrait of Edmund Halley 92 The Orbit of Halley's Comet 103 Relative Sizes of the Earth, the Moon and Halley's Comet 103 Donati's Comet of 1858 106 The Civil War Comet of 1863 109 Coggia's Comet of 1874 112 Halley's Conception of a Collision with the Comet 119
TO THE COMET
Lone wanderer of the trackless sky! Companionless! Say, dost thou fly Along thy solitary path, A flaming messenger of wrath-- Warning with thy portentous train Of earthquake, plague and battle-plain? Some say that thou dost never fail To bring some evil in thy tail. W. LATTEY.
THE COMING OF THE COMET
The Sun will surely rise and set to-morrow.
Just so surely must a Comet flare forth in our Heavens this Spring.
Star gazers, astronomers and learned men have been waiting for this Comet all over the earth--in America, in Europe, in far China.
They have known for certain that this Comet would come; and they knew just when and where in the Heavens the Comet would first show itself to the naked eye--down to the very night.
All this has been known so surely because this same Comet has been seen by the people of this earth before.
It came and went seventy-four years ago. Seventy-six years before that, it came and went. And seventy-six years before that, the Comet had come and gone.
As long as human beings have lived on this earth--for thousands and thousands of years--human eyes have beheld this same Comet every seventy-six years or so.
The longest time between the Comet's coming has been seventy-nine years. The shortest interval of all--74 1/2 years--was this time.
For thousands of years in the past, wise men have written down records of this Comet.
Long, long ago, when white men were still savages who dwelt in caves, patient star gazers in China and Chaldea studied the motions of this Comet.
Farther back than that, in the hoary days before the art of writing was known, ancient bards sang of this Star and its hairy tail. Some of their words are still remembered.
Artists have drawn pictures of this Comet. Their pictures are still shown.
Women have stitched images of this Comet into their handiwork. Some of this handiwork can still be seen.
Coiners have stamped designs of this comet on their coins and medals. Those coins are still shown in museums.
Priests, Popes and great Divines have preached about this Comet. Their sermons are still preserved in the records of the Church.
Learned men have written in their books what happened when the Comet came. Those books are read to-day.
The coming of this Comet in olden times has been fixed in lasting records, which he who runs may read.
Nothing in all History is more certain than the story of this Comet.
WHY HALLEY'S COMET?
Two hundred and twenty-eight years ago, when this Comet was seen shining over the City of London, the great astronomer, Edmund Halley, made a special study of it.
Halley was the first to say that this Comet had come before and would surely come again. He wrote down the time when the Comet would come again, long after he should be dead.
"If it should return," he wrote, "according to our predictions, about the year 1758, impartial posterity will not refuse to acknowledge that this was first discovered by an Englishman."
The Comet returned, as he had foretold, seventeen years after Halley's death, when it was first seen in 1758, on Christmas night, by a man in Saxony, named Palitsch, who was looking for the Comet.
From that day this Comet has been called after Halley.
Since then many famous astronomers, such as Clairaut, Pont?coulant and Laplace in France, have calculated the dates for the Comet's return.
Last time, in 1835, Halley's Comet returned within a few nights of their prediction.
This time, so the astronomers figured seventy-five years ago, the Comet should be plainly seen after dark late this May.
What they predicted has come true.
THE TERROR OF THE COMET
So long as the memory of man goes back, the appearance of a Comet has always been taken as a just cause for dread.
In the train of Comets, it has ever been held, come wars, bloodshed, fires, floods, plagues, famine and the fall of mighty rulers.
Our Holy Bible confirms this time-honoured belief.
"Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from Heaven."
In the Revelation of St. John the Divine we read:
"There fell from Heaven a great star burning as a torch," and again :
"There was seen another sign in Heaven, and behold a great red dragon ... and his tail draweth a third part of the stars in Heaven. And behold the third woe cometh quickly."
The "flaming sword" in the hands of the angel of the Lord, when Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden, many sacred writers hold, can only be interpreted as a Comet.
So, too, when Jerusalem was to be wasted by a plague, David beheld a Comet in the shape of a flaming sword:
The fall of Satan, some sacred writers hold, was marked by the appearance of a Comet. In Isaiah we find:
"How art thou fallen from Heaven, O flaming one, son of the morning!"
John Milton, in his "Paradise Lost," has fixed this image in immortal verse:
"Satan stood Unterrified, and as a Comet burned That fired the length of Ophiuchus huge In th' arctic sky, and from its horrid hair, Shakes pestilence and war."
The Great Deluge, described in Holy Writ, came after the appearance of a mighty Comet , so Dr. William Whiston, Sir Isaac Newton's successor in the Lucasian chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, set forth in a special treatise. The great French astronomer, Laplace, also reached the same conclusion.
This same Comet likewise foretold the final fall of the Holy City, Jerusalem, in the year 70 after Christ. This Comet was seen by St. Peter. Josephus in his History of the Jewish Wars recorded the nightly appearance of this Comet over the City of Jerusalem just before the war which ended with the destruction of the Holy City.
"Amongst other warnings," writes Josephus, who saw this Comet with his own eyes, "a Comet of the kind called sword-shaped, because their tails appear to represent the blade of a sword, was seen above the city for the space of a whole year."
Josephus at the time rebuked his Jewish countrymen for listening to false prophets while so clear a sign from Heaven was before their very eyes.
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