Page:The story of the comets.djvu/261

XIV.

Hippei: equinus barbatus = like a horse's mane.

Lampadiæ: (2) lampadiformis = torch-shaped.

Barbatus = bearded.

Cornutus bicuspidatus = double-pointed.

Acontiæ: faculiformis lunatus = like a small torch.

Xiphiæ: ensiformis = sword-shaped.

Longites: hastiformis = spear-shaped.

Monstriferus = horror-producing.

It seems a pity that so much romance in the way of classification should have been lost to astronomy and wasted on meteorology!

Seneca considered that comets must be above (i.e. beyond) the Moon, and he judged from their rising and setting that they had something in common with the stars.

Paracelsus insisted that comets were celestial messengers sent to foretell good or bad events, but he does not seem to have suggested how to discriminate between the different comets and the different events. It must be confessed that this idea has not yet died out, but subsists as regards both aspects. I believe I once saw it stated somewhere that Napoleon looked upon the great Comet of 1811 as presaging the success of his invasion of Russia, but in the event it was the other way about. Napoleon had previously regarded the great Comet of 1769 as his protecting génie, and as late as 1808 Messier published a book on it to uphold the idea.

A story was told some 30 years ago in a well-known French periodical that at Moscow an unfavourable omen was drawn from the appearance of this comet. A conversation is related as having taken place between the abbess of a certain religious house and one of her nuns, to the following effect. One evening on their way to Church, the nun suddenly noticed the comet and uttered a cry of alarm, asking "what that star was." The abbess replied, "It is not a star: it is a comet." The nun rejoined, "But what is a comet? I never heard that word." The abbess then answered, "They are signs in the heavens, which God sends before misfortunes." The nun, who was the narrator of the story, thus comments on the occurrence: "Every night the comet blazed in the