Virginia Free Press & Farmers' Repository

THE COMET.

If the prediction of Astronomers should be verified, we shall be visited the present summer with a Comet of unusual dimensions, which will approach the earth's orbit more nearly, it is said, than any former one of those sublime and incomprehensible strangers. Some of the accounts state, that it will approach within 20,000 miles of us, and that it will appear to the naked eye as large as the full moon, with a broad coma or tail, streaming through half the heavens! We regret to see some disposed to humor the fancies and superstitions of the weak-minded and ignorant, by speaking of these burning bodies as celestial omens, premonitory of some signal calamity on earth. Some have already announced the expected visitant as the herald of war, betokening the hostile shock of nations, the revolution of states, or the dismemberment of empires; while others intimate, that it may "be intended by the Deity, as an agent to brush away the heavens and destroy the earth."

Though Science is yet as much in the dark, respecting the purposes of Comets in creation, as ignorance was two centuries ago, yet we had hoped that the human intellect was so far advanced towards truth in its researches after the arcana of their order, as to have got rid of superstitious terror.—Especially after the events in Virginia, connected with the singular appearance of the Sun last Summer, we hoped, at least, that prudence would have suggested a lesson of caution, and that those whose business it is to enlighten public sentiment, would have spoken of the Comet as connected with physical, rather than with moral or political causes. Without hazarding a conjecture as to the use or ends for which they are designed, it is sufficient for presumptuous man to know, that wild and eccentric as they seem to the eye of reason, they constitute an indispensable and orderly part of a wise, harmonious and magnificent whole.

(Raleigh (N. C.) Register.