Let us proceed in regular order.
{p. 65}
CHAPTER II.
WHAT IS A COMET?
IN the first place, are comets composed of solid, liquid, or gaseous
substances? Are they something, or the next thing to nothing?
It has been supposed by some that they are made of the most
attenuated gases, so imponderable that if the earth were to pass
through one of them we would be unconscious of the contact. Others
have imagined them to be mere smoke-wreaths, faint mists, so rarefied
that the substance of one a hundred million miles long could, like
the genie in the Arabian story, be inclosed in one of Solomon's brass
bottles.
But the results of recent researches contradict these views:
Padre Secchi, of Rome, observed, in Donati's comet, of 1858, from the
15th to the 22d of October, that the nucleus threw out intermittingly
from itself appendages having the form of brilliant, coma-shaped
masses of incandescent substance twisted violently backward. He
accounts for these very remarkable changes of configuration by the
influence first of the sun's heat upon the comet's substance as it
approached toward perihelion, and afterward by the production in the
luminous emanations thus generated of enormous tides and perturbation
derangements.
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