destroying wasps, and cursing poor Whitechapel shoemakers with four babies at a birth! or destroying cities by an earthquake, knocking down steeple clocks in Scotland, and indulging in other undignified vagaries of the kind!
I have some personal reason, if I may be allowed the expression, to take a special interest in the fair fame of the Comet of 1668, as there would appear to be some chance that I may in the end turn out to be identical with that splendid object, to whom a period of 16 years has been assigned, and whose last recorded appearance bears date 1843. Mind, I do not mean to assert anything positive about this matter, which resolves itself simply into a question of identity. I know that there is an individual of your species waiting for me now at the Cape of Good Hope, who will bring his powerful reflector, and equally powerful intellect, to bear upon me; and you may well afford to wait till next spring, when you will most probably learn from that quarter whether I am the real Simon Pure of 1668, with a period of 16 years, or have a period of something like 150 times as long. At all events, surely, where learned astronomers disagree, you would not ask a poor Comet like me to decide!
Even so recently as 1829, a most learned English medical practitioner, a Mr. T. Forster, made a fierce onslaught on the character of Comets in general, to whom he ascribes all imaginable malignant influences, such as epidemic diseases of all
