deavour, not, indeed, to satisfy your curiosity in all matters concerning me and my brethren, but to give you some few scraps of information and stray hints about us, leaving you to make the best use of them you may, in your interminable cruise on the endless sea of speculation.
Well, then, I am one of a most numerous family. Johannes Kepler—one of those bright intellectual stars that adorn and illumine your microscopic mite of a sphere, and render it interesting even to the giants of creation—declared that “there are more comets in space than fishes in the ocean.” A kindred spirit, a Kepler of the present age—Arago—has calculated our number at some three and a half millions at the lowest computation, and possibly twice as many. We are of all sizes and magnitudes, from the incredibly immense down to the minutest telescopic.
rather hard upon the poor comets. He calls them mere gatherings of vapour, visible nothings, devoid of all physical properties, incapable of doing either good or harm, and useful simply through enabling us to verify Newton’s law of attraction, and explore the regions of heaven far beyond the limits of the solar system. He says science now knows all about them, and the public have ceased taking the least interest in them. It would be interesting to know whether M. Babinet has since seen reason to modify this somewhat contemptuous opinion of those “strange wanderers of the sky.” Certain, however, it is, that science confessedly knows as yet very little about comets, and that the apparition and passage of Donati’s Comet in 1858 has been narrowly watched and tracked with the most eager curiosity, and with the most lively interest.
