Comets [pp. 105-107]

18 4.] COLIfETh. 105
circumstance without, that no manly man
would, consciously, enact the unequal part.
Unconsciously, it is luis favorite rleo; only at
intervals is his suspicion awakened that he
is a Drawcansir of the drawing-room, a Bobadil of the boudoir. Should his suspicion
amount to conviction, he is covered with mortification, and resolves thereafter to show his
prowess in a field whence contest is not banished. Would that man might oftener detect
his despotic disposition, and carry it where
rugged opposition might effect its cure! Illumination of the ampler sort is needed for the
fair disclosure; and the few to whom it
comes, should bless their fortune. It is
questionable if men of lofty character and
ideal tendency would not, were election imperative, prefer to be ranked rather among
the henpecked than the tyrants. Those
would, at worst, be mildly dominated; and
the domination would not be irksome, because they who bear it would be mindful that
it could be readily overthrown. These would
be deteriorated by growing selfishness, stultified by the license of conceit. Those would
be comforted by the thought that the chains
they wear were wrought from flowers; that
the annoyances they endure must have the
ending of a comedy. These would be cankered by the base habit they indulge, and
be stung some time with the memory that
they had struck away the clinging hands of
love.
Every government is more or less a gynocracy, notwithstanding the withholding of
feminine suffrage. Every man, if he rise to
genuine manhood, is some time or other under the rule of women; the some time or
-other frequently including the better part of
his life. If he must be so subjected-and he
usuallyrefuses not to be-it is well his subjecter should be his wife, since her interest
is his, and she can hardly lead him so far
astray that he may not woo hert back by
sweetness and sincerity. Why should helnpecked be applied to marriage alone, as
though there were a stigma in any large concession to her who is its undisputed queen?
Romancers and poets paint in golden hues the
enslavement of lovers, and the world reads
them with eager approval. The bard is not
yet born that has sung the glories of henpecked husbands, who merit more admiration
and sympathy than they get-if for no other
reason, for their radiant rarity. Illustrious
characters, innumerable heroes, have been
chronicled as henpecked; and yet their henpeckedness has not hurt their fame, nor interfered with their idealization. Tyrant
lieges always stain a life they may otherwise
have ennobled, dash with contempt such
veneration as they may have evoked.
Of the henpecked, there is always hope;
for the tyrant, there is danger of despair.
One usually has the elements of goodness
and generosity; the other is likely to be fixed
in sordidness and insensibility. Henpeckedhess is, after all, more an echo than a voice;
a figment than a reality; a suspicion than a
truth. If the cock-cowed wives could but
tell their story, would not many of their husbands beg to be named among the henpecked
for very shame?
JUNSIUS HENRI BROWNE.
COMETS.
LD Leonard Digges, ill his "Prognosti cations for 1556," tells us that "com etes signific corruptions of the ayre. They
are signs of earthquakes, of warres, of chan gying kyngdomes, great dearthe of corne,
yea a common death of man and beast."
Quite up to the middle of the eighteenth
century, similar ideas regarding these strange
visitors were universally held in Europe.
They were hardly supposed to be the legiti mate objects of research, and we accordingly
have singularly few accurate descriptions of
the earlier ones which were visible in Europe.
The Chinese, however, if they knew very lit tle about them, still catalogued their places
among the fixed stars with great assiduity,
so that we frequently owe all our knowledge
of an ancient comet to the patience of the
Chinese astronomer-royals (for there were al ways two of them, He and Ho).
The record of Man-tuan-lin, which con tains an account of comets visible in China
between the years 611 B. c. and 1640 A. D.,
has lately become accessible through the
translation by Dr. Williams, late Secretary
of the Royal Astronomical Society. Astron omers have assiduously collected all refer ences in classic literature to appearances in
the sky which might have been comets, and
the number of such objects is about five hun dred, which, with the three hundred known
comets, makes eight hundred: thus Kepler
is partly justified in his saying that "there
are more comets in the sky than fish in the
ocean," particularly if we consider that a
comet, to have a place in one of the ancient
records, must have been at least as bright as
the comet of Coggia, which we see every
evening in our northwestern sky, and when
we further remember that, for every one as
bright as this, there are probably fifty which
are only visible in the telescope. In fact,
nearly every year six or eight telescopic com ets are found by various observers, while a
brilliant comet comes not more than once in
a decade, on the average.
These telescopic comets were physically
of little interest until lately. They usually
consist of a nucleus more or less bright, sur rounded by a globular mist or nebulous mass,
which is generally extremely faint. No
amount of telescopic scrutiny will reveal
more than the bald fact of their existence,
and the secret of their physical structure was
a kind of astronomical oyster which it re mained for spectrum analysis to open.
Nevertheless, astronomers were assiduous
in searching for them and in computing their
orbits, and they have been rewarded by the
finding of some very interesting objects of
this class.
We may say, as a general rule, that comets
move in an orbit of which the shape is nearly
parabolic. Of two hundred and thirty-nine
comets whose orbits had been accurately as signed up to 1866, one hundred and seventy eight moved in parabolas, five in hyperbolas,
which differed little from a parabola, and
fifty-six in ellipses.
It is the comets which move in ellipses
| which are peculiarly interesting, for, from the
nature of the ellipse, which is a closed curve,
a comet of such an orbit must be a member
of our own system, and such a one, oncediscovered, we expect to see again. The comet
which moves in a parabola comes into the
system, moves rapidly through it, and, circling round the sun, leaves us forever-unless,
indeed, it is caught by some of the exterior
planets, and, by the virtue of their attraction, has its orbit changed to an ellipse.
Of the fifty-six comets with elliptic orbits
(periodic comets), nineteen are well known,
and these have returned to us obedient to the
law of their motion; two of them (Encke's
and Halley's) have returned each no less than
sixteen times.
The two comets last named are of exceeding interest. All Europe was, in 1680, in exactly the state of mind which Master Digges
has described so well: a comet was "a corruption of the ayre," a thing of evil omen.
In 1680 appeared a magnificent comet,
which was an object of the greatest fear and
wonder. In 1684 Newton published his
"Principia," in which he discussed the orbits
of comets in general, and particularly the
orbit of this comet, according to his general
method.
Halley, who was then a young student of
astronomy, was led, by the reading of the
"Principia," to the examination of the orbits
of several previously-recorded comets, and
his labor and genius were rewarded by the
grand discovery that the comet of 1682 had
previously been seen in 1607, and, even before that, in 1531. Hence he concluded that
its period was in the neighborhood of seventyfive years, and he predicted its return in
1758.
This was a great step in advance; for, if
a comet were simply a body amenable to the
ordinary laws of the planets, its terror was
removed. Then, again, this prediction was
a great step for astronomy, showing as it did
that the science was gradually acquiring certainty and confidence.
Halley at first inferred that, as the comet
of 1682 had appeared seventy-five and a half
years previously, so it would return seventyfive and a half years from that time. But if
it were to be regarded, so far as its relations
to the laws of motion went, as a planetary
body, why, then, it must be subject to perturbations, produced by neighboring bodies,
just as planets are. So that he was led to reexamine his calculations, and to compute the
perturbations produced by Jupiter. From all
considerations he assigned the end of 1758 or
the beginning of 1759 as the epoch of its reappearance.
The great fame of Halley caused his prediction to be received with wide-spread interest, and, as the time of its predicted reappearance approached, expectation was at its
height, more particularly because a great
French geometer, Clairaut, had reexamined
Halley's orbit, and had assigned April 13,
1759, as the day of its nearest approach to
the sun.
It was, in fact, seen on Christmas-day,
1758, and its perihelion passage was on
March 12, 1759, one month earlier than the
predicted time.
This was, indeed, a great triumph for sci
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