reminds us that comets are nothing more
than a species of drifting mist; that they
are not coherent masses at all; and that we
have nothing to fear from

                               The airy justles
     Of those atoms and corpuscles.

It is not to be hoped, however, that the
ignorant and superstitious will refrain from
snatching a fearful joy from their anticipations
of the thirteenth.

The belief in great convulsions of the
universe is as old as the era of the ancient
Egyptians. When Herodotus was in the
land of the Pyramids, he was told " by the
priests" that, in the course of eleven thousand
three hundred and forty years (which
prodigious lapse of time they claimed to be
included in their history), the sun had four
times altered his course—twice rising where
he now sets, and setting where he now
rises. But, they added that no evil effects
had followed: the solar vagaries were
apparently of not the slightest importance to
the earth. The ancient Egyptians, being
ignorant of the fact that the motion of the
sun is not real, but only apparent, were of
course not aware that, if the effect they
spoke of had ever really taken place, it must
have resulted from some change in the position
and rotation of our own globe, the sun
all the while remaining stationary. But, it
is singular to find our sage and serious poet,
Spenser, after the promulgation of the
Copernican system, gravely repeating the fable
with every appearance of awe-struck belief.
In the Introduction to the Fifth Book of the
Faery Queene, he thus performs the part of
Cassandra on a large scale:

                                    The heavens' revolution
     Is wandred farre from where it first was pight,
     And so does make contrarie constitution
  Of all this lower world toward his dissolution.

     For whoso list into the heavens looke,
     And search the courses of the rowling spheares,
     Shall find that from the point where they first tooke
     Their setting forth, in these few thousand yeares
     They all are wandred much; that plaine appeares:
     For that same golden fleecy ram, wh: bore
     Phrixus and Helle from their stepdame's feares,
     Hath now forgot where he was plast of yore,
  And shouldred hath the bull wh: fayre Europa bore:

     And eke the bull hath with his bow-bent horne
     So hardly butted those two twinnes of Jove,
     That they have crusht the crab, and quite him borne
     Into the great Nemæan lion's grove.
     So now all range, and doe at random rove
     Out of their proper places farre away,
     And all this world with them amisse does move,
     And all his creatures from their course astray,
  Till they arrive at their last ruinous decay.

     Ne is that same great glorious lampe of light,
     That doth enlumine all these lesser fyres,
     In better case, ne keepes his course more right,
     But is miscarried with the other spheares:
     For, since the terme of fourteen hundred yeres,
     That learned Ptolomæe his hight did take.
     He is declyned from that marke of theirs
     Nigh thirtie minutes to the southerne lake;
  That makes me feare in time he will us quite forsake.

     And if to those Egyptian wisards old
     (Which in star-read were wont have best insight)
     Faith may be given, it is by them told
     That since the time they first took the sunne's hight,
     Foure times his place he shifted hath in sight,
     And twice hath risen where he now doth west,
     And wested twice where he ought rise aright.
     But most is Mars amisse of all the rest;
  And next to him old Saturne, that was wont be best.

The Egyptian tradition to which Herodotus
refers has been attributed by a learned
commentator to the defect of the solar year.
Horne, in his Introduction to the Critical
Study of the Scriptures, refers it to the
narrative in Joshua of the sun standing still
(chapter the tenth, verse the twelfth), and to
the story of the sun going ten degrees
backward at the prayer of Isaiah, related in the
Second Book of Kings (chapter the
twentieth, verse the eleventh), and in the Book of
Isaiah (chapter the thirty-eighth, verse the
eighth). But, Herodotus is not the only
ancient writer who records the Egyptian
story of a vast disturbance of the celestial
system. The same relation is referred to by
Plato, Pomponius Mela, Plutarch, Achilles
Tatius, Solinus, and others. Modern
astronomers, however, repudiate the narrative as
inconsistent with probability and with facts.

The Greek fable of Phaeton driving the
horses of the sun, which ran away with him,
and nearly burnt up the world by going too
near it, is supposed by some commentators
to refer to a disturbance of the heavenly
bodies at some very remote period. The
American scholar, Anthon, in criticising this
fable, says: " Aristotle states, upon the
authority of some of the ancient writers,
that, in the time of Phaeton, there fell from
heaven flames that consumed several countries;
and Eusebius places this deluge of
fire in the same age with that of Deucalion.
The most curious circumstance connected
with the story of Phaeton, is the fact that
the name of Eridanus, of the river into which
he is said to have fallen, belongs properly to
the Rodaun, a small stream in the north of
Europe, running near Dantzic. The poets
fabled that the tears shed by Phaeton's
sisters were converted into amber; and,
what is very remarkable, there was no amber
ever found in the vicinity of the Po; whereas
the Phoenicians drew their main supply from
the shores of the Baltic, and from the
immediate vicinity of the true Eridanus itself.
Was the scene, then, of the catastrophe of
Phaeton laid in so northern a latitude?
There is nothing at all absurd in this
supposition, since an extraordinary heat might
have prevailed for a certain time as well in a
northern as in any other latitude. But, the