Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/755

Rh of England, and which was anathematized by Pope Calixtus as portending evil to Christendom four centuries later, was found to be, as Seneca had prophesied, a heavenly body obeying the great laws of the universe, and coming at regular periods. Thenceforth the whole ponderous enginery of superstition, with its citations of proof-texts regarding "signs in the heavens," its theological reasoning to show the moral necessity of cometary warnings, and its ecclesiastical fulminations against the "atheism, godlessness, and infidelity" of scientific investigation, was seen by all thinking men to be as weak against the scientific method as Indian arrows against needle-guns. Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Cassini, Doerfel, Halley, and Clairaut had gained the victory.

And still even good men looked longingly back to the old belief. It was so hard for them to give up the doctrine of "signs in the heavens," seemingly based upon Scripture, and exercising such a healthful moral tendency! As is always the case under such circumstances, votaries of "sacred science" appeared, and these exerted the greatest ingenuity in averting the new doctrine; but their voices gradually died into silence, though far within our own century Joseph de Maistre echoed them in declaring his belief that comets are special warnings of evil.

There did, indeed, still linger one little cloud-patch of superstition, arising from the supposed fact that comets had really been followed by a marked rise in temperature. Even this poor basis for the belief that comets might, after all, affect earthly affairs was swept away. Science won here another victory, for Arago, by thermometric records carefully kept at Paris from 1735 to 1781, proved that comets had produced no effect upon temperature. Among multitudes of similar examples he showed that, in some years when several comets appeared, the temperature was lower than in other years when few or none appeared. In 1737 there were two comets, and the weather was cool; in 1765 there was no comet, and the weather was hot; through the whole fifty years it was shown that comets were sometimes followed by hot weather, sometimes by cool, and that no rule was deducible. The victory of science was complete at every point.

But in this whole history there was one little exhibition so curious as to be worthy of notice, though its permanent effect upon thought was small. Whiston and Burnet, so devoted to what they considered sacred science, had determined that in some way comets must be instruments of divine wrath. One of them maintained that the deluge was caused by the tail of a comet striking the earth; the other