GATHERING WORLD STUFF. 209 



from the infinite. Before discernible to unaided eyes, the 

 astronomer with his instrument detects it as a faint luminosity 

 just appeared. For weeks he watches its changes. Nightly 

 it grows brighter. It is approaching ; it will arrive. Like 

 the head-light of a locomotive seen at first as a luminous 

 point in the far distance, over some miles of track, gradually 

 growing brighter with no other evidence of motion with 

 brightness at length increasing in accelerated ratio, then daz- 

 zling us by its glare, and finally thundering past with a veloc- 

 ity which appalls, and retiring into the night which reigns in 

 the opposite direction so comes the head-light of a train of 

 cosmical matter; so grows its luminosity; with such a stun- 

 ning demonstration of physical power it rushes past us, and 

 sinks into infinite distance in another quarter of the heavens. 

 I confess it is impossible to contemplate all this without a 

 feeling of awe. 



Would that the mystery of the comet were once unfolded 

 to us ! It tantalizes us by its near approach and its undimin- 

 ished inscrutableness. But, thanks to intelligence thanks to 

 the spirit of science thanks to that beneficent constitution of 

 the universe by which it gives up its secrets one by one, to 

 the demands of intelligent inquiry, we have found out some- 

 thing. We have seen comets torn to pieces by the power of 

 attraction without a collision by the attractions of the sat- 

 ellites of Jupiter. This was Bi-e'-la's [Be-a'la] comet, and 

 each fragment thenceforward pursued its separate path. We 

 have seen comets so shattered and disintegrated by the pulls 

 and strains to which they were subjected in our system in 

 making their circuit about our sun, in getting through the en- 

 tanglements of Jupiter's and Saturn's attractions, that they 

 appeared literally to be going to pieces and dividing up their 

 remains among the planetary masses of the system. 



The comet, in short, appears to be essentially a train of 

 stones flying with three thousand times the velocity of the 

 railroad " express." The smaller stones more resisted than the 

 larger ones, by other matter disseminated through space, 

 slacken their motion slightly, and are struck by the larger 



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