734 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



put forth the theory that comets are places of punishment for the 

 damned in fact, " flying hells." Both these theories were soon dis- 

 credited. 



Perhaps this theory can best be met by another which, if not fully 

 established, appears much the better based of the two ; namely, that 

 in 1868 the earth passed directly through the tail of a comet, with no 

 deluge, no sound of any wailings of the damned, with slight appear- 

 ances here and there, only to be detected by the keen sight of the 

 meteorological or astronomical observer.* In our own country super- 

 stitious ideas regarding comets continued to have some little cur- 

 rency ; f but their life was short. The tendency shown by Cotton 

 Mather, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, toward acknowl- 

 edging the victory of science was completed by the utterances of Win- 

 throp, professor at Harvard. In 1759 he published two lectures on 

 comets, and in these he simply and clearly revealed the truth, never 

 scoffing, but reasoning quietly and reverently. In one passage he 

 says, " To be thrown into a panic whenever a comet appears, on ac- 

 count of the ill effects which some few of them might possibly pro- 

 duce, if they were not under proper direction, betrays a weakness 

 unbecoming a reasonable being." J 



The victory was, indeed, complete. Happily, none of the fears ex- 

 pressed by Conrad Dieterich or Increase Mather were realized. No 

 catastrophe has ensued either to religion or morals. In the realm of 

 religion, the Psalms of David remain no less beautiful, the great ut- 

 terances of the Hebrew prophets no less powerful ; the Sermon on the 

 Mount, " the first commandment and the second which is like unto it," 

 the definition of " pure religion and undefiled," by St. James, appeal 

 no less to the deepest things in the human heart. In the realm of 

 morals, too, serviceable as the idea of fire-brands thrown by the right 

 hand of an avenging God to scare a naughty world might seem, any 

 competent historian must find that the destruction of the old theologi- 

 cal cometary theory was followed by moral improvement rather than 

 by deterioration. We have but to compare the general moral tone of 

 society to-day, wretchedly imperfect as it is, with that existing in the 

 time when this superstition had its strongest hold, to make ourselves 

 sure of this. We have only to compare the court of Henry VIII with 

 the court of Victoria, the reign of the late Valois and earlier Bour- 

 bon princes with the present French Republic, the period of the 

 Medici and Sforzas and Borgias with the period of Leo XIII and 

 Humbert, the monstrous wickedness of the Thirty Years' War with 

 the ennobling patriotism of the Franco-Prussian struggle, and the 



* See Guillemin and Watson. 



f See sermon of Israel Loring, of Sudbury, published in 1722 (Professor M. C. Tyler's 

 manuscript notes). 



\ See Professor J. Winthrop on comets (Professor Tyler's manuscript notes, pp. 15 

 and 1G). 



