The Coming Comet

Another cornet, and one of considerable promise, has been discovered by a young astronomer in Albany. It is now 200,000,000 miles from its perihelion, but it is said to be coming toward the earth at the rate of two million miles a day, and late in May, or early in June, will be within ten million miles of the sun. What it will do then - whether, finding its quarters too hot, it will do as others have done, play shy of the sun and run away, or continue to approach it, until it infringes on ita luminous rim, or falls into its capacious cavitiea, who can teil ? That it is a vtry large cornet is fairly inferable from the fact that, at its present distance it shows a bright tail and a. starlike nucleus. The pofsibility of peril to the earth. from the fall of a great cornet into the sun, has been a tubject of consideration, sinee Mr. Proctcr's recent article on a certain menacing cornet to return in 1897. The popular notion of danger from comets ha3 been that of danger from their strik ing the eartb. The form in which apprehension of late has taken rise is froiu the fall of some great cornet into the suu, thereby so increasing ÍU heat as to make it disastrous to lile on the earth, Mr. Proctor seems to think that if the world is ever to be destroyed by heat, this will be the way of it. Astronomers who do not accept Proctor's concluaions say it would require a body as large as Júpiter, cimpared with which all kuowD comets are but pitjmiep, to produce an increasa of solar heat tbat would be as disastrous es Mr. Proctorsupposcs ; or, tbat the cornet, ia approachiog the sun, wquld be pulled in picp:s, radually, and its hü so prQlonged through many revolutions, that the heat would be distributed ovev a lenglh of time which would rnake il comparatively harmless, or that f a cornet fall into the sun, the increaae of heat would be mainly U3ed up in produclng an expansión of the sun's orb, and would afterwards ba radiated out through a long space of time ; or, that the great evaporation, three-fourths of the earth's surface being watev, would itself protect the earth from hariu by the sun'g heat. But we may aa well await the approach of the celestial visitor with serenity. He will come with royalsplendor, and give Ihegood and wise aH opportuuity to witnes grand and imposing phenonema, anc should his coming even (Jestroy thi eártb, the goocl and wise " can ge along very well without it.''