uthor begins to show the signification of comets according to
the part of the heavens in which they appear, and what fortunes they
prognosticate to the Roman empire and their Persian enemies. The
chapter, however, is imperfect. (Edit. Neibuhr, p. 290.)--M.]

[Footnote 75: Seneca's viith book of Natural Questions displays, in the
theory of comets, a philosophic mind. Yet should we not too candidly
confound a vague prediction, a venient tempus, &c., with the merit of
real discoveries.]

[Footnote 76: Astronomers may study Newton and Halley. I draw my humble
science from the article Comete, in the French Encyclopedie, by M.
d'Alembert.]

[Footnote 77: Whiston, the honest, pious, visionary Whiston, had
fancied for the aera of Noah's flood (2242 years before Christ) a prior
apparition of the same comet which drowned the earth with its tail.]

[Footnote 78: A Dissertation of Freret (Memoires de l'Academie des
Inscriptions, tom. x. p. 357-377) affords a happy union of philosophy
and erudition. The phenomenon in the time of Ogyges was preserved by
Varro, (Apud Augustin. de Civitate Dei, xxi. 8,) who quotes Castor,
Dion of Naples, and Adastrus of Cyzicus--nobiles mathematici. The two
subsequent periods are preserved by the Greek mythologists and the
spurious books of Sibylline verses.]

[Footnote 79: Pliny (Hist. Nat. ii. 23) has transcribed the original
memorial of Augustus. Mairan, in his most ingenious letters to the
P. Parennin, missionary in China, removes the games and the comet of
September, from the year 44 to the year 43, before the Christian
aera; but I am not totally subdued by the criticism of the astronomer,
(Opuscules, p. 275 )]

[Footnote 80: This last comet was visible in the month of December,
1680. Bayle, who began his Pensees sur la Comete in January, 1681,
(Oeuvres, tom. iii.,) was forced to argue that a supernatural comet
would have confirmed the ancients in their idolatry. Bernoulli (see his
Eloge, in Fontenelle, tom. v. p. 99) was forced to allow that the tail
though not the head, was a sign of the wrath of God.]

[Footnote 81: Paradise Lost was published in the year 1667; and the
famous lines (l. ii. 708, &c.) which startled the licenser, may allude
to the recent comet of 1664, observed by Cassini at Rome in the presence
of Queen Christina, (Fontenelle, in his Eloge, tom. v. p. 338.) Had
Charles II. betrayed any symptoms of curiosity or fear?]

[Footnote 8111: Compare Pingre, Histoire des Cometes