This last astronomer, many years before, had computed the exact time of its coming and came within four days of it. For this brilliant feat Count Pontécoulant received a gold medal from the French Academy of Sciences.
HALLEY’S COMET OF 1835.
FROM A DRAWING BY ROSENBERGER.
The German astronomer, Rosenberger, who had likewise computed the Comet’s return, coming within five days of its passage nearest to the Sun, received a similar gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society of Great Britain.
Professor Struve, who studied the Comet through the great telescope at Dorpat in Russia, described it as “glowing like a red-hot coal of oblong form.”
Bessel, who observed it from the Koenigsberg observatory in Northern Germany, described the Comet’s appearance as that of “a blazing rocket, the flame from which was driven aside as by a strong gale, or as the stream of fire from the discharge of a cannon when the sparks and smoke are carried backwards by the wind.”
Struve at Koenigsberg and Kaiser at Leyden were the first to see the Comet with their naked eyes in the third week of September.
Immediately after the Comet became generally visible in the Old World the bubonic plague, known of old as the “Black Death,” broke out in Egypt. In the City of Alexandria alone 9,000 people died on one day. By the Moslems this calamity was generally attributed to the evil influence of the Comet.
In America the Comet became visible to the naked eye only late in the year. Then, on its approach to the Sun, it was lost to view and passed over to the Southern Hemisphere where it was next observed by Sir John Herschel in South Africa.
Shortly after its brief blaze over North America the great “New York Fire” laid waste the entire business section of the biggest city in the New World. All the commercial centre of the city, including the richest firms and largest commercial warehouses, were laid in ashes. The fire raged through days and nights. In all, 530 houses burned down and $18,000,000 of property was consumed. Owing to the intense cold, the sufferings of the homeless were pitiable.