What has gone before, will, I think, have served abundantly to establish the position with which I started, namely, that comets occupy (and deservedly so) the front rank amongst those astronomical objects in which, on occasions, the general public takes an interest.
I have thus completed, so far as the space at my disposal has permitted, a popular descriptive Survey of the Solar System. Those who have perused the preceding pages, however slight may have been their previous acquaintance with the Science of Astronomy taken as a whole, will have no difficulty in realising that what I have said bears but a small proportion to what I have left unsaid. They will equally, I hope, be able to see, without indeed the necessity of a suggestion, that all those wondrous orbs which we call the planets could neither have come into existence nor have been maintained in their allotted places for so many thousands of years, except as the result of Design emanating from an All-powerful Creator.
FOOTNOTES.
[1]The remark in the text applies to all the major planets and to a large number of the minor planets, but certain of the minor planets travel in orbits which are considerably inclined to the ecliptic, and therefore to all the other planets.
[2]Given in full in my Handbook of Astronomy, 4th ed., vol. i., p. 26.
[3]“Recollections of Past Life,” 2nd ed., p. 305.
[4]For some information respecting these Secchi “Types” of Stars, see my “Story of the Stars,” 2nd ed., p. 140.
[5]The circle and the ellipse are what are called “closed” curves.
[6]It is not a little singular that the Chinese in bygone centuries have often alluded to comets under the name of vapours; e.g., the comet of 1618 is recorded as having been “a white vapour 20 cubits long.”