Show concerning THE COMET atthe at the present time there la Is dimly discernible I 1 in n the northern ak eky Y a tenuous looking will willomae o the wisp and who have devoted their lives to men a and me make a business of explorations of the upper deep hold nightly interviews with the little e wanderer that is when view is ia unobstructed the the such in form for one comet t com another it undoubtedly jr is or does doe not seem disposed to cultivate neighbor lyre relations lations with our planet plane tj although one or two of the knowing ones have expressed the opinion thal thai the orbits of t the he two may intersect at a not set got down on the map this speculation of the baseless largely is natural product of minds which bor ort t a constantly ot bent beat upon the things are and which therefore theredo re faraway away far the that t be impressionable by dreams and airy are more re than by the more equations fleshly and solid things of this grove groveling 1 existence even van it if the earth were to pass pan through the phosphorescent train of a comet it would be a circumstance altogether unappreciable to us in instructors advise astronomical tacit fact our vise us that this very thing was done a few years ago in the case of the mag comet of 1862 we believe the of a ca comets met mets s caudal appendage is so great that it does no not enter the domain of substantial thin things digs at all but Is in rather of the nature of a trans translucent lucen t hose haze stars stare are nearly as easily seen through it as when it is not in the way this of course referring to the more remote portion of it for fer the density increases as the head of taig the comet is approached and this itself to Is undoubtedly a more or lose less solid to collide with the masa a it if this were earue it might shake us up consider r especially illy who when we consider that all comets move along at a rate dozens downs and it may be hundreds of times as fast as our comparatively snail paced earth does and yet we lose no time if the matter ot of miles an hour to Is to be taken into consideration how ever evert it is to be hoped that no one will abandon himself to gloomy apprehend eions over such a result for it to is not likely to occur the word comet is from froin the greek coma mean meaning ng hair planet is from the same tongue and means wanderer both appellations appel lations are singularly inappropriate prop and illustrate again how prone is the uncultured mind to attach appearances and meanings to things in accordance with its own limited scope there is nothing remotely resembling sem bling hair about a comet and the planets are not in any son sense wanderers as am they do pates about the center of our system with an unvarying regularity which no ao mechanism can approach year after year age after 0 0 r age and cycle after cycle has it been with them a steady unswerving course in their mighty sweep through space yet so nicely are the laws of force from and without applied that no deflection 00 oo ours cure indeed a variance in one of their paths by so much as the curve sometimes imparted to the flight of a baseball might produce a perturbation throughout the entire solar system I 1 there Is not much that resembles a wanderer in thle this surely but the comet la Is that and nothing else but three or four comets are known to have fixed orbits and only two or three of these are ever seen twice by the same generation their orbits are so extremely elongated it Is held that there them are as many of the other kind as there are fishes in the sea and their deportment in space must be the very no ne plus ultra of celestial eccentricity they meander around until our sun by his own movement through the ethereal depths or that of the corn comet ot and perhaps both bring the latter within his influence and then it makeni a plunge almost directly for his blazing breast we may not see it until it has been on the way for weeks at the rate of several thousand miles SL a minute and may not see it at all do de pending upon its ats magnitude and out our relative positions it flies to its nearest approach to the sun its speed constantly increasing and when it gets as near as is consist ent ant with a flank bank movement at the right time it darts past and nearly around the burning zone thence disappearing as rapidly as an it came and being lost to the view of span forever why to is it that the power which seemingly draws it toward itself becomes apparently all at once a repelling one and that which threatened to plunge into the furnace is in kept at a proper distance and sent seat back to the depths of the sea from whence it came earned As a scientific question no astronomer or other person can answer with any degree of satisfaction nor can any of them give us even more than a theory of what comets are why they are or by w what hatchey they are controlled by the aid of the prism and spectroscope we know some of their component parts and that to is all we do know and yet some of them have a approached preached pro ached so near the sun that adyth anything 14 M metallic 1 1 1 T 1 contained in them would have melted as rapidly as a snowball in a blazing fire comets are mysterious visitors and the comparativo comparative Ire frequency quency of their coming instead of diminishing tho ther interest inter esc in them which we al feel does but increase it whether we shall ever know more of them than now is ie merely a guess but it may be received as a certainty that every time on one approaches a hundred telescopes teles copee manned by as many skilled and exper fenced Is D ced sky voyagers vo y agers will be trained upon it all intent upon adding whatsoever they may to the fund of matlon mation now possessed meantime theories constructed out of logical promises premises beliefs and even well worded apostrophes to the comet are strictly in order |