Page:The fairy tales of science.djvu/242

206 Bacon, equally wise, equally mean—declared that we moved regularly in orbits fixed by natural laws, and expressed his conviction that posterity would one day stand aghast at the blindness of his age, which could ignore or disregard facts so clear and palpable.

One of the brightest of our family—so bright, indeed, as to be plainly visible in the daytime, happening to make its appearance in the year 44 or 43 B.C., a short time before or after the assassination of Cæsar—was held to have, if not actually brought about the death of the aspiring dictator, at all events predicted or attended it—as if the heavens would be likely to take an interest in the life or death of such a “thing of blood and mire!”

Another Comet—the first whose orbit was calculated, in 1682, by your illustrious Edmund Halley, whose name it bears, and will hand down to the remotest ages—had, at one of its former appearances, in June, 1456, spread terror throughout Europe. It was regarded as a most powerful ally of the Turkish Sultan, Mohammed II., who had taken Constantinople, and threatened to overrun Christian Europe with his victorious armies. Pope Calixtus II. thought it high time to come to the aid of his sorely-pressed flock, and launched the thunders of the Vatican against the celestial visitor, who thereupon (in due course of time) disappeared from the heavens; the Pope, in order to perpetuate this startling manifestation of the power of the Church,