COMETS 229 



I once saw five * on Monday mornings as I passed on 

 my way to the school. To a Pauline it is not without 

 significance that the return of Halley's comet is awaited 

 within a year of Milton's tercentenary, and that the 

 greatest astronomer and the greatest poet of their age 

 were London boys and Paulines. 



Ancient records tell of comets of gigantic size, of the 

 shape of a sword, the head as big as the moon, and so on. 

 There is no reason to suppose that within historic times 

 there have been any much bigger than that of 1858. 

 Milton, in the lines above quoted, was not referring to an 

 imaginary comet, but to one which actually did appear 

 when he was a boy of ten (1618), in the constellation called 

 Ophiuchus. It was of enormous size, the tail being 

 recorded as longer even than that of 1858. It was held 

 responsible by educated and learned men of the day for 

 disasters. Evelyn says in his diary, " The effects of that 

 comet, 1618, still working in the prodigious revolutions 

 now beginning in Europe, especially in Germany." The 

 comet of 1665 was, with equal assurance, regarded as the 

 cause of the Great Plague of London. In that year was 

 published the first number of the Philosophical Trans- 

 actions of the Royal Society of London, then recently 

 founded " for the promotion of natural knowledge." It 

 contains an account of a paper by a learned French 

 gentleman, M. Auzout, in which an attempt is made to 

 predict the movements among the stars of the comet of 

 1664. Astronomers had long known and been able to 

 predict the movements of the planets and the swinging of 

 the constellations, but, as the French author observes, " all 

 the world had been hitherto persuaded that the motions of 

 comets were so irregular that they could not be reduced 

 to any laws." He also hoped, by examining the move- 

 ments of the comets of 1664 and 1665, to determine "the 

 1 The pirates of the Flowery Land. 



