owth and decay which seem everywhere to represent the immutable order
of nature.

COMETS AND METEORS

Until the mathematician ferreted out the secret, it surely never could
have been suspected by any one that the earth's serene attendant,

"That orbed maiden, with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon,"

could be plotting injury to her parent orb. But there is another
inhabitant of the skies whose purposes have not been similarly free from
popular suspicion. Needless to say I refer to the black sheep of the
sidereal family, that "celestial vagabond" the comet.

Time out of mind these wanderers have been supposed to presage war,
famine, pestilence, perhaps the destruction of the world. And little
wonder. Here is a body which comes flashing out of boundless space into
our system, shooting out a pyrotechnic tail some hundreds of millions of
miles in length; whirling, perhaps, through the very atmosphere of the
sun at a speed of three or four hundred miles a second; then darting off
on a hyperbolic orbit that forbids it ever to return, or an elliptical
one that cannot be closed for hundreds or thousands of years; the tail
meantime pointing always away from the sun, and fading to nothingness as
the weird voyager recedes into the spatial void whence it came. Not many
times need the advent of such an apparition coincide with the outbreak
of a pestilence or the death of a Caesar to stamp the race of comets as
an ominous clan in the minds of all superstitious generations.

It is true, a hard blow was struck at the prestige of these alleged
supernatural agents when Newton proved that the great comet of 1680
obeyed Kepler's laws in its flight about the sun; and an even harder
one when the same visitant came back in 1758, obedient to Halley's
prediction, after its three-quarters of a century of voyaging but in
the abyss of space. Proved thus to bow to natural law, the celestial
messenger could no longer fully, sustain its role. But long-standing
notoriety cannot be lived down in a day, and the comet, though proved a
"natural" object, was still regarded as a very menacing one for
another hundred years or so. It remained for the nineteenth century to
completely unmask the pretender and show how egregiously our forebears
had been deceived.

The unmasking began early in the century, when Dr. Olbers, then the
highest authority on the subject, expressed the opinion that
the spectacular tail, which had all along