228 SCIENCE FROM AN EASY CHAIR 



know much of their movements and regular comings and 

 goings. The earliest priests, the earliest " wise men," were 

 those who knew the stars and could fix the seasons by 

 their place ; the earliest temples Stonehenge, and others 

 older still were star-temples or observatories, and their 

 priests were astronomers. To such a pitch did reverence 

 for star-knowledge attain that our ancestors confused the 

 astral signs of changing season and cycle with the cause 

 itself of change, and attributed all kinds of mundane events 

 and each man's fate to " the influence of the stars." Hence 

 the sudden appearance of a flaming comet was held to be 

 a portent, and was always supposed either to foretell or 

 even to produce some very unpleasant event, such as a big 

 war or a pestilence, or the death of some one supposed to 

 be of consequence. The earliest Greek poetry enshrines 

 the superstition, which is handed on by Virgil, and finally 

 by Milton. In Pope's translation of the Iliad we find the 

 helmet of the terrible Achilles described as shining 



"Like the red star, that from his flaming hair 

 Shakes down diseases, pestilence, and war." 



And Milton, in 1665, in his Paradise Lost, wrote 



"On th'other side, 



Incenst with indignation, Satan stood 

 Unterrifi'd ; and like a comet burn'd, 

 That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge 

 In th' Arctic sky, and from his horrid hair 

 Shakes pestilence and war." 



In this year of the celebration of the tercentenary of 

 Milton's birth, it is not a little curious to find that John 

 Milton, himself a scholar of St. Paul's School, wrote those 

 lines when Edmund Halley, the future Astronomer Royal, 

 had just entered the same great school, then standing in 

 St. Paul's Churchyard, as it did when I was " one of the 

 fishes," and used to see men hanging in the Old Bailey 



