"They traveled together for three days. The little ones disappeared first and then the large one."
And again:
"On June 27th, A. D. 416, two comets appeared in the constellation Hercules, and pursued nearly the same path."[2]
If mere proximity to the earth served to split Biela's comet into two fragments, why might not a comet, which came near enough to strike the earth, be broken into several separate forms?
So that there is nothing improbable in Hesiod's description of two or three aërial monsters appearing at or about the same time, or of one being the apparent offspring of the other, since a large comet may, like Biela's, have broken in two before the eyes of the people.
Hesiod tells us that the Earth united with Night to do a terrible deed, by which the Heavens were much wronged. The Earth prepared a large sickle of white iron, with jagged teeth, and gave it to her son Cronus, and stationed him in ambush, and when Heaven came, Cronus, his son, grasped at him, and with his "huge sickle, long and jagged-toothed," cruelly wounded him.
[1. Kirkwood, "Comets and Meteors," p. 60.
2. Ibid., p. 51.]
{p. 137}
Was this jagged, white, sickle-shaped object a comet?