PART 11.]* Mr. URBAN,

O much having been said from

Magazine respecting Comets, I wish to offer the following desultory observations, on a subject which cannot fail to interest every inquirer after philosophical truth.

And first, I think a comet may have been nothing more nor less than the foundation of the ancient fable of the Phoenix, and make no doubt but that this idea, once started, all who may refer to the accounts which the ancients give of that miraculous bird, as they thought it, will be of the same opinion. I will mention here only those of Herodotus and Tacitus, because I have them by me. They have handed to after times descriptions of a phoenix with all the air of a reality. But we may gather from them that, though the learning of Egypt was displayed, and Greece exhausted her ingenuity, in discussions of its history, yet it could not be denied that it was considerably mixed with fable; which Herodotus seems to imply, in saying, Εγω μην μιν εκ ίδεν, εἰ μη ὅσον γραφη. And Tacitus also, when he says, 'hæc incerta et fabulosis aucta.' However, it is plain that they never hit upon the true materials from which the fabulous part was worked up. Some of the moderns, indeed, seem to be satisfied that the ancient histories of it were fabulous, but they appear to have thought no further about it. In the Introduction to a work on Entomology, by Kirby and Smart, there is a remark, that it had been objected against Clemens Romanus, that he believed in the absurd fable of the phonix,'-absurd, perhaps, as a reality,

but not as a fable. All fables must have some materials, some tangible point, to form their allegory upon, and we may say of them what Dr. Johnson says of a parable, that a fable is a relation under which something else is figured.'

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What think you, then, of a comet's being that something else' figured by the fable of the Phoenix? Allowing for circumstances, can there be a closer description of a comet than that which Herodotus, Pliny, Tacitus, nay, all the ancient writers on the subject, give of the phoenix? There you have most of the material circumstances of a comet delineated. Its periods of absence, GENT. MAG. Suppl. XCVIII, PART II.

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sphere, which moderns have thought

to be a collection of innumerable small stars, advolavisse multo ceterarum volucrum comitatu,' as Tacitus also expresses himself, are all minutely detailed.

Now, that in fabulous ages,-and in so remote a time that even the most learned of the ancient philosophers could not solve the fable, (and Herodotus lived in such an age, and was remarkable for his credulity,)-a comet should be the subject of a fable, is not so very surprising; but that such an author as the elegant Tacitus, and in the Augustan age too, should give such a description as above alluded to, with so much gravity, with such extreme credulity, and without a single attempt at solution, nay, seeming to express despair of doing so, is astonishing. Therefore, that Clemens Romanus, Pomponius Mela, and many other writers of the Christian æra, adopted his opinions, need not so much surprise us.

But surely, according to the old adage, wonders will never cease; for that, with the learning of the ancients to help us, with all the philosophy of the moderns, with all the march of intellect, the fable or riddle of the Phoenix should not have been deve

loped in the present day, must be a still greater wonder than the truth of the fable itself would be.

The very name Phoenix seems to accord with the object in question; it being doubtless derived from the Greek word ooo, which signifies to shine with a glowing purple. Herodotus says, τα μεν αὐτε χρυσοκόμα, των πρεTwv, rade iguga. And the luminous matter which is diffused around comets, has been, by modern astronomers, described as similar in colour to an aurora borealis, which I myself have many times seen of the above hue. So that I think it may be fairly concluded that the Phoenix of the ancients was the Comet fabled, that the origin was not discovered by any of the ancient writers whose works are now extant, and consequently that when Herodotus wrote, there had been a decrease of the knowledge of astronomy, since the periods of the return of the miraculous bird had been ascer

tained with tolerable precision; but the the knowledge of the bird itself was lost.

I will now advance an hypothesis, which you may possibly deem still more wild than all the reveries of the ancients upon the subject; which is, that a comet may probably be a body of ice, and inhabited by as active a race of beings as this lower world, as we term it, is. We are told, indeed, by some, that the planets cannot be inhabited by living beings, on account of their extreme distance from the Sun, and that the further all bodies are from that luminary, the colder. How far more cold, then, may a comet be, that travels beyond the ken of mortal eyes into regions of space, an inconceivable distance from the Sun! But

if that species of insects called crickets can live, of which we have a sufficient proof, amongst red-hot bricks; or if toads, as is also the case, can exist alive far beneath the surface of the earth in blocks of marble impervious both to Sun and air, who will question whether the Creator of all things has the power of suiting life to the utmost extremes of heat and cold, or to any situation whatever?

The appearance, under which a comet presents itself to the eye, almost every way agrees with the hypothesis of its being a body of ice. For instance, it is allowed to be larger in its approach to, than it is in its retreat from, the Sun. Now it must necessarily, when at so far a distance from the Sun as in its aphelion, be extreme cold, at which time, having gained, as ice naturally does, through increasing cold, from the particles around it, a vast accumulation of matter, so as to give the Sun a renewed power of attraction over it, it commences its course back again to that luminary, till on its approach to the neighbour hood of the Sun and in its perihelion, it loses enough of matter to be again repelled.

Their tails also, which some have thought to be formed of innumerable small stars, (and to these Tacitus probably alluded in the words mentioned above, namely, multo ceterarum volucrum comitatu,) may be naturally accounted for from this waste.

Euler starts an idea, that on a comet's approaching the Sun, the impulse of the solar rays may drive the finer particles of the comet's atino

sphere in a direction of course opposite to the Sun, and that these particles become visible in the shape of a tail, which, from the resistance it may meet with, moving obliquely through the ether, may put on that curved appearance which the tail is often observed to assume. May not these finer particles, then, so subject to the Sun's impulse, be ice dissolved into that thin vapour with which a comet is so often perceived to be surrounded, and from its mere velocity, continually, in part at least, be left behind, and form its tail, which also is observed to grow larger as it approaches to, and to diminish as it recedes from, that luminary?

Comets also have a peculiarly pale or dim light, which, if they be ice, can be no more extraordinary than those paler and dimmer appearances on the face of the Moon, which are supposed by astronomers to be water, and to admit the rays of the Sun instead of reflecting them so strongly as the other parts which are considered as solid earths, do.*

Some astronomers have conjectured that the general deluge was produced by the near approach of a comet, whose atmosphere had been attracted by the earth. This also is a very plausible notion, on a supposition that it is a body of ice in a continual state of liquefaction, whilst in the neighbourhood of a luminary causing such an intensity of heat, as we practically know exists in the regions between the tropics, and which may be infinitely greater on a body so near the Sun as a comet in that part of its orbit.

I must, however, beg you to consider me as only giving vent to a few loose ideas, under a wish that you or your friends may so turn them to account, as that the subject may be taken up and enlarged upon in a more able and scientific way. N-M.

* In Todd's Johnson's Dictionary, there is this note, "According to Sir Isaac Newton, the tail of a comet is a very thin vapour, furnished by the atmosphere of the down to the planets, and become intermincomet. This may probably be attracted gled with their atmospheres. For the con

servation of the water, and moisture of the planets, comets seem absolutely requisite.

suspect, adds Sir Isaac, that the spirit which makes the finest, subtlest, and best part of our air, and which is absolutely requisite for the life and being of all things, comes principally from comets.'

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