Page:Newton's Principia (1846).djvu/62

 attracting more matter, became a primary planet; and then, by increasing still, became a comet, which, after certain revolutions, by coming nearer and nearer to the sun, had all its volatile parts condensed, and became a matter fit to recruit and replenish the sun (which must waste by the constant heat and light it emitted), as a faggot would this fire if put into it (we were sitting by a wood fire), and that that would probably be the effect of the comet of 1680, sooner or later; for, by the observations made upon it, it appeared, before it came near the sun, with a tail only two or three degrees long; but, by the heat it contracted, in going so near the sun, it seemed to have a tail of thirty or forty degrees when it went from it; that he could not say when this comet would drop into the sun; it might perhaps have five or six revolutions more first, but whenever it did it would so much increase the heat of the sun that this earth would be burned, and no animals in it could live. That he took the three phenomena, seen by Hipparchus, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler's disciples, to have been of this kind, for he could not otherwise account for an extraordinary light, as those were, appearing, all at once, among the the fixed stars (all which he took to be suns, enlightening other planets, as our sun does ours), as big as Mercury or Venus seems to us, and gradually diminishing, for sixteen months, and then sinking into nothing. He seemed to doubt whether there were not intelligent beings, superior to us, who superintended these revolutions of the heavenly bodies, by the direction of the Supreme Being. He appeared also to be very clearly of opinion that the inhabitants of this world were of short date, and alledged, as one reason for that opinion, that all arts, as letters, ships, printing, needle, &c., were discovered within the memory of history, which could not have happened if the world had been eternal; and that there were visible marks of ruin upon it which could not be effected by flood only. When I asked him how this earth could have been repeopled if ever it had undergone the same fate it was threatened with hereafter, by the comet of 1680, he answered, that required the power of a Creator. He said he took all the planets to be composed of the same matter with this earth, viz.: earth, water, stones, &c., but variously concocted. I