calamity conceivable. He bore especially upon the fact that
the comet of 1665 was coincident with the plague in London, apparently
forgetting that the other great cities of England and the Continent were
not thus visited; and, in a climax, announces the fact that the comet of
1663 "made all the cats in Westphalia sick."

There still lingered one little cloud-patch of superstition, arising
mainly from the supposed fact that comets had really been followed by
a marked rise in temperature. Even this poor basis for the belief
that they might, after all, affect earthly affairs was swept away, and
science won here another victory; for Arago, by thermometric records
carefully kept at Paris from 1735 to 1781, proved that comets had
produced no effect upon temperature. Among multitudes of similar
examples he showed that, in some years when several comets appeared, the
temperature was lower than in other years when few or none appeared. In
1737 there were two comets, and the weather was cool; in 1785 there was
no comet, and the weather was hot; through the whole fifty years it was
shown that comets were sometimes followed by hot weather, sometimes
by cool, and that no rule was deducible. The victory of science was
complete at every point.(123)

(123) For Forster, see his Illustrations of the Atmospherical Origin of
Epidemic Diseases, Chelmsford, 1829, cited by Arago; also in Quarterly
Review for April, 1835. For the writings of several on both sides, and
especially those who sought to save, as far as possible, the sacred
theory of comets, see Madler, vol. ii, p. 384 et seq., and Wolf, p. 186.

But in this history there was one little exhibition so curious as to be
worthy of notice, though its permanent effect upon thought was small.
Whiston and Burnet, so devoted to what they considered sacred science,
had determined that in some way comets must be instruments of Divine
wrath. One of them maintained that the deluge was caused by the tail of
a comet striking the earth; the other put forth the theory that comets
are places of punishment for the damned--in fact, "flying hells." The
theories of Whiston and Burnet found wide acceptance also in Germany,
mainly through the all-powerful mediation of Gottsched, so long, from
his professor's chair at Leipsic, the dictator of orthodox thought,
who not only wrote a brief tractate of his own upon the subject, but
furnished a voluminous historical introduction to the more elaborate