mmon Telescopes_, says that the satellite
theory of the rings certainly seems insufficient to account for the
phenomena of the dark ring. It seems, on the contrary, manifest that the
dark ring can scarcely be explained in any other way. The observations
recently made are altogether inexplicable on any other theory.

[38] 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.

[39] It is not easy to understand what else it could have been. The
notion that a conjunction of three planets, which took place shortly
before 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, being a clergyman, can scarcely have done.

[40] 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 cleverly 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.'

[41] It may be necessary to throw in here a few words of explanation,
lest the non-astronomical reader should run away with the idea that the
so-called exact science is a very inexact science indeed, so far as
comets are concerned. The comet of 1680 was one of those which travel on
a very eccentric orbit. Coming, indeed, from out depths many times more
remote than the path even of the remotest planet, Neptune, this comet
approached nearer to the sun