Hudson. — On the Comet of 1901. 31 



passes into orange, then yellow, green, blue, and violet. But 

 between forty thousand vibrations in a second and four 

 hundred millions of millions we have no organ of sense 

 capable of receiving the impression. Yet between these limits 

 any number of sensations may exist. We have five senses, 

 and sometimes fancy that no others are possible. But it is 

 obvious that we cannot measure the infinite by our own 

 narrow limitations. 



" Moreover, looking at the question from the other side, we 

 find in animals complex organs of sense richly supplied with 

 nerves, but the function of which we are as yet powerless to 

 explain. There may be fifty other senses as different from 

 ours as sound is from sight ; and even within the boundaries 

 of our own senses there may be endless sounds which we can- 

 not hear, and colours, as different as red from green, of which 

 we have no conception. These and a thousand other ques- 

 tions remain for solution. The familiar world which sur- 

 rounds us may be a totally different place to other animals. 

 To them it may be full of music which we cannot hear, of 

 colour which we cannot see, of sensations which we cannot 

 conceive. To place stuffed birds and beasts in glass cases, to 

 arrange insects in cabinets and dry plants in drawers, is 

 merely the drudgery and preliminary of study ; to watch their 

 habits, to understand their relations to one another, to study 

 their instincts and intelligence, to ascertain their adaptations 

 and their relations to the forces of nature, to realise what the 

 world appears to them — these constitute, as it seems to me at 

 least, the true interest of natural history, and may even give 

 us the clue to senses and perceptions of which at present we 

 have no conception." 



Art. III. — Notes on the Comet of April, May, and June, 1901. 



By G. V. Hudson. 

 [Read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, 25th June, H01.~\ 



Plate I. 



My wife and I simultaneously saw this comet from Karori on 

 the morning of the 25th April, at 5.25 a.m. It was then rising 

 behind the eastern ranges, and was sufficiently bright to be 

 conspicuous as a distinct streak of light through some light 

 cirrus cloud in the sky at the time. At about 5.40 it rose 

 clear of the cirrus, and its brightness was so great that I was 

 much surprised that it had not been reported as previously 

 observed. A cablegram announcing that it had been seen in 



