COMETS AS PORTENTS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10007, 1 April 1910, Page 4

COMETS AS PORTENTS.

"The scientific has ever run neck and neck with the popular view of comets," writes a contributor to the January "Windsor Magazine" oa "The Coming Comet," "but until quite recently those who ran with the former counted but in digits, while the hc'er took toll of the vast majori.y of mankind. Comets were

looked upon as portents from earliest tiroes. Matthew of Westminster, a monkish chronicler, speaks of them as being 'always the foreteller of i future destruction.' No comfort is to be derived from the fact that this was in the Dark Ages, for in the enlightened days of 'the close to the seventeenth century, Evelyn notes (1680) : 'They may be warnings from God, as they are commonly forerunners of His animadversions.' Hall y's Comet has had a sad record I in Ivi coring this uncomfortable superstition. On its celebrated appearance in 1066, it was looked upon as an omen of the passing of Saxon England and the dominance of the Norman rule. The tradition is preserved in the famous Bayeux Tapestry, where the Saxons are shown gazing with wondering eyes upon the celes- 1 tial object, while Harold is still at ease on his throne. In 11 B.C it appeared before tha death of Agrippa; in 65 B.C. it hung over Jerusalem which was hastening to its fal'; in A.D. 218 it shone before the death of the Emperor Macrinus; Attila's death came shortly after its appearance in 451, and so its various appearances might be chronicled, some event of ill fame attaching to very many ot them. The coincidence was readily magniiied into a relation much more intimate, and thence comets came to be looked upon as harbingers • of disaster."