Edwin Emerson

“ International committees of astronomers meet daily to mark the approach of the Comet. Bulletins are published announcing the steadily dwindling distance between the world and the huge projectile in the sky. The great tail, arching the Heavens as the Comet approaches, seems like a mighty, fiery sword held in an unseen Titanic [Pg 121] hand and relentlessly sweeping down. The temples, churches and synagogues are thronged with supplicating multitudes on bended knees, in a catalepsy of terror. The stock exchanges, banks, shops and public institutions are deserted. Business is at a standstill. ”

“ A Comet may be regarded as a huge lighted torch whirling through space, which may be brought dangerously near that upper layer of highly inflammable hydrogen. If the gas shall ever be touched off by this flying torch, our planet will be ignited. The whole atmosphere will become a seething ocean of flame, in which forests and cities will burn like straw, in which oceans will boil away in vast clouds of steam, and in which all animal life will be snuffed out of existence before it shall realize that the world is on fire. ”

“ That hairy Comet, that long streaming Star,
Which threatens Earth with Famine, Plague and War?”
—Sylvester. 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. ”

“ When the Comet rushes on toward the Sun, invariably the tail drifts behind the nucleus like the smoke from a locomotive. But when the Comet swings around the Sun and travels away from it, a startling change takes place. ”

“ As a rule, the energy is converted into heat. A bullet discharged from a rifle is often melted when suddenly stopped by steel armour. A Comet travels at a pace compared with which a projectile, fired from the most powerful twelve-inch gun, seems only to crawl. What, then, must be the frightful effect when it strikes the Earth?
A Comet rushes through space not at the bullet’s rate of thousands of feet an hour, but of a million miles an hour. The bigger it is, and the faster it moves, the greater will be the heat developed by its stoppage. ”

“ Already the outermost jets of flame had reached the Moon. From one instant to the next the flaming rays would descend upon the Earth.
All eyes were distended with horror when it was seen that the horizon was lighting up with tiny violet flames as from a vast fire.
An instant afterward, the Comet diminished in brilliancy. This was apparently because the Comet, upon touching the atmosphere of our [Pg 124] Earth, had come within the penumbra of our planet and had lost part of its reflected light coming from the Sun. But in reality this apparent extinction was the effect of contrast. ”

“ When a Comet is first seen in the telescope, it appears as a diminutive filmy patch, often unadorned by any tail. As it travels on toward the Sun, at a speed compared with which a modern rifle bullet would seem to crawl, violent eruptions occur in the nucleus. ”

“ By means of the wonderful instrument called the spectroscope, an instrument which analyzes a distant star as readily as if it were a stone picked up in the road, it has been discovered that a Comet’s tail is composed of gases called “hydrocarbons” (combinations of hydrogen and carbon) , and that it bears a close chemical resemblance to the blue flame of a kitchen gas-stove.
Illuminating gas, as we all know, is poisonous. ”

“ That electricity plays its part in the formation of the fairy plume is conceivable, and even probable; but recently the physicist has discovered a new source of repellent energy which very plausibly explains the mystery of a Comet’s tail.
This new source of energy is nothing less than the pressure or push of the Sun’s light. Solar gravitation is a force more powerful than we can realize. If it were possible for us to live on the Sun, we would find ourselves pulled down so violently that our body would weigh two tons. Our clothing alone would weigh more than one hundred pounds. ”

“ The Earth and the Comet must meet. With some hesitation the astronomer sends a telegram to a central observatory, which acts as a distributor of astronomical news. At first his prediction is discredited and even laughed at. Another computation is made at the observatory. Again mathematics infallibly indicates the exact time and place of the encounter, and the last lingering hope is dispelled. Telegrams are sent to astronomical societies, to the leading scientific periodicals and to the newspapers. ”

“ In a way, Comets may be said to bleed to death. At each return of Halley’s Comet, future astronomers will find it less brilliant than it was seventy-six or seventy-seven years before. Some time there will be no Halley’s Comet left, and the most famous Comet of its kind will be reduced to a shoal of meteors varying in weight from a few ounces to several tons and faithfully pursuing the orbit which their parent traced and retraced century after century. ”

“ In a word, the globe will become a planetary funeral pyre. Since water results from burning hydrogen in oxygen, this same fierce and terrible flame must be speedily extinguished by a mighty deluge which will engulf the Earth.
A spectroscope analysis of Halley’s Comet has furthermore revealed the presence of cyanogen gas in the tail. Cyanogen is a compound of nitrogen and carbon, one of the most poisonous compounds with which the chemist is familiar. ”

“ If that gas is present in large enough quantities, one flick of a Comet’s tail will end all human and animal existence.
So much is certain. A collision of the Earth with a Comet will [Pg 118] undoubtedly prove disastrous—how disastrous will depend largely on the size of the Comet’s head and on its speed. That a violent heat will be developed, we have every reason to believe, from our knowledge of meteors. The mere movement of a meteor through the thin upper layers of our atmosphere produces a dazzling trail and reduces the meteor itself to a molten metallic mass. ”

“ With the passing of the Comet to the Southern Hemisphere, bloody wars broke out one after another in Mexico, Cuba, Central America, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and Argentina. All those countries were in a welter of blood.
At the same time the American settlers of Texas declared themselves independent and made open war on Mexico. The war began with the bloody battle of Gonzales, in which 500 American frontiersmen fought and defeated over a thousand Mexican soldiers. ”

“ At first the prediction of the Earth’s doom is received with popular incredulity, engendered by years of newspaper misrepresentation. The world’s end has been too frequently and too frightfully foretold on flamboyant double-page Sunday editions. When the truth is at last accepted, after days of insistent repetition of the original announcement, a wave of terror runs through the world. ”

“ The most ominous of all prophesies connected with the coming of Halley’s Comet this year was made by the venerable General Ballington Booth, the head of the Salvation Army. Speaking in London, immediately after Halley’s Comet had been located, early this year, General Booth said:
“We are, this year, rapidly approaching the end of all things, with similar results, but far surpassing in horrors any disaster that has gone before. ”

“ With the aid of instruments that feel what our hands can never feel and see what our eyes can never see, the modern physicist has critically analyzed the radiation that beats upon the earth from the distant Sun.
Light really does sway infinitely small particles, as was first experimentally proved by the Russian Lebedev. Two American astronomers, Nichols and Hull, improved upon his method. They cast the solar effulgence into mighty mathematical scales and found that the earth sustains a light-load of no less than 75,000 tons. ”

“ According to this metaphysical theory, the close approach of a Comet to the earth affects and disturbs men’s brains, so that men are inwardly stirred with warlike impulses. Hence the great wars almost invariably following the appearance of Comets.
Hence, too, the appeal to Comets made by so many conquerors, from William the Conqueror down to Napoleon. In the homely phrase of one writer, “the inner eye of man, under the weird effect of a Comet, sees red and makes him thirst for blood.” ”

“ Although more than two centuries have passed since Halley was in his prime, the possibility of a collision with some vagabond star still haunts the mind of the astronomer.
That a collision is apt to occur is an admitted astronomic fact. The latest estimate, made in 1909 by Prof. William H. Pickering of Harvard University, would seem to prove that the core of one Comet in about 100,000,000 Comets will hit the earth squarely. An encounter with some part of a Comet’s head will happen once in 4,000,000 years. ”

“ 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—741⁄2 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. ”

“ Although in his sixty-fourth year, he then undertook to observe the moon through an entire revolution of her nodes (eighteen years) , and actually carried out his purpose. To appreciate the full significance of so painstaking an achievement it should be borne in mind that astronomical observations must be made in a temperature equal to that of the open air. Observatories cannot be heated because the heat would impair the accuracy of the instruments.
Great astronomers, like poets, are born, not made. Edmund Halley was one of these. ”

“ Before we can completely accept the view that light-pressure forms this train of soot we must ascertain whether the pressure of light is capable of accounting for the flash-like rapidity with which a Comet’s tail changes. ”

“ The seed which was thus sown by Halley has borne fruit. In Halley’s own [Pg 114] time, learned men were brooding over the ultimate destruction of the Earth by collision with a Comet.
Dr. Whiston, who succeeded Newton at Cambridge in the Lucasian chair of mathematics, was sure that a Comet caused the Deluge, and went so far as to prophesy that a Comet, as it passed us on its outward course from the Sun, would ultimately bring about a “General Conflagration,” and thus envelope the Earth in flames. ”

“ A Comet may throw out a tail sixty million miles long in two days. Is it actually possible for light-pressure to accomplish that astonishing feat? Arrhenius has computed that 865,000 miles an hour is the speed of a light-flung particle of one-half the critical diameter. Because they are only one-eighteenth as large as this particle of critical diameter, the dust grains in a Comet’s tail would be propelled over the same 865,000 miles in less than four minutes. It follows that the solar radiation is amply strong enough to toss out a tail of sixty million miles in two days. ”

“ The Comet appeared late in the year, and was seen at its brightest over Northern Europe, in Scotland, Scandinavia, Russia and Poland.
All these countries, during the same period and immediately afterwards, were cursed by the terrible pestilence called the “Black Death,” now known to have been the worst visitation of the bubonic plague known in history. Wherever the dread sickness appeared, the people “died like rats.” ”

“ The tail of a Comet is fraught with still other possible dangers. Our atmosphere contains a certain amount of hydrogen, a marvellously light gas to which balloons owe their buoyancy. Besides its lightness, this gas is characterized by an extreme inflammability. The law of the diffusion of gases teaches us that part of this hydrogen in the air is mechanically mixed with other gases, and that part of it probably floats in the upper air, far beyond the reach of any balloon. ”

“ At nineteen he was recognized as an astronomer of reputation, having supplied a new and improved method of determining the elements of the planetary orbits. His detection of considerable errors in the tables then in use led him to the conclusion that a more accurate determination of the places of the [Pg 94] fixed Stars was indispensable to the progress of astronomy. With this end in view he set out on a voyage to the other side of the globe, St. Helena, where he undertook the task of making complete new observations of the entire Southern Hemisphere. ”

“ The earth is under a terrific strain from Comets and planetary revolutions. Human destiny is red. That means blood. Political events are black. Terrible changes are imminent.
“This winter, France will be swept by terrible floods. Paris will be under water. The influence of form changes in other planets and the coming of a Comet will affect us for the worse. ”

“ Meanwhile the Wise Men from the East, as described in the same story, were travelling over the desert, on the alert for the apparition of the star, whose coming had been revealed to them.
“Suddenly, in the air before them, not farther up than a low hill-top,” writes Lew Wallace, “flared a lambent flame; as they looked at it, the apparition contracted into a focus of dazzling lustre. Their hearts beat fast; their souls thrilled; and they shouted as with one voice: ‘The Star! the Star! ”

“ He has collected a formidable mass of photographic evidence which seems to show that there are other influences at work besides the Sun’s radiation, and that these influences manifest themselves in distorting and breaking a Comet’s tail. In some Comets of recent years, streams of matter have been shot out in large angles to the main direction of the tail without being at all bent by the pressure of light. In Morehouse’s Comet of 1908, tails were repeatedly formed and discarded to drift bodily out into space and melt away. ”

“ Soothsayers at the court of King Prusias of Bithynia, in Asia Minor, whither Hannibal had fled from the Romans, told the King that the Comet betokened Hannibal’s early death. This so wrought on Hannibal’s spirit that he ended his life with poison. [Pg 36]
In the year 150 B. C., appeared another Comet “of horrible size.” It was seen for many nights running all over the Mediterranean Sea. Its appearance was followed by the outbreak of the third great Punic War between Rome and Carthage. ”