EARTH’S NARROW ESCAPE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 450, 18 February 1909, Page 4

EARTH’S NARROW ESCAPE.

NKARRY DFSROWFD BY A ORFAT COM FT.

If one may believe Camille Flammarion, the earth has; had a very narrow cscaj e from nothing less than our old friend the comet. Had it come a little nearer than it did, it would have left the earth as dead as the moon, so far ,as living creatures are concerned, an earth on which buildings, monuments, machines, ships would have remained as they are, but peopled only with rotting corpses. Some of the trees might have survived, but the birds and beasts that inhabit the forests and fields would have perished instantly, and all that would have been left of animal life in this world would have been the fishes in the sea and the worms and the larvae that lire in the earth.

All the rest of animal kind would have died of poison ! For this comet was made of cyanogen, a gas so deadly that a few whiffs of it would have annihilated everything that breaths. Flammarion asserts that its progress was watched from an observatory in Marseilles. When first seen, it is said, it was a pale and minute nebula of the ninth magnitude. But it increased rapidly in brilliancy : in fifteen days later it was in the eighth magnitude ; then it mounted to the seventh, and in these last days it has attained the sixth —that is to say, the limit of visibility with the naked eye.

In its first days a tail began to form ; then it gradually grew and showered divisions, jets of light, separated and parted from one another over great angular distances- Thanks to the clearness of the sky, photographs were taken of two or three hours’ and more exposure, and the Lumicre plates have given marvellous results.

The nature of cornels is still one of the mysteries of science comments Flammarion. Here is a sort of ball ot wind, bigger than the earth, which rushes across the immensity of the heavens with a speed of 150,000 kilometres an hour, squirting, out, not behind it, but opposite to or away from the sun, smoke, vapour, gas, to a distance of millions and millions of kilometres. These gases may leave it and remain in the ether. A repellant force emanating from the sun produces these enigmatic tails, but at the same time there ate at work phenomena, mechanical, chemical, physical, unknown, which imperil the comet itself, contort it, dislocate it, utterly change it. Klectricity is probably at work, solar heat also exerts its influence, and these burning daughters of the infinite develop in unheard of proportion as fast they approach the sun, but all these phenomena are taking place in the bosom of the ultra-glacial cold of space about 700-deg. F. below zero. Truly we can form no idea of them.