"Cometary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... also find similar evidence of increasing knowledge. The periodicity of the sun spots, the existence of systems of binary stars, meteor showers, and their affinity with cometary orbits may be mentioned as among the more important, while a host of new comets, chiefly telescopic, have been detected. Large numbers of nebulae and double stars have been catalogued, and we have evidence every year of the activity ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... passing as it were through the infinity of space they are continually gratified by the sight of new systems and worlds, and you can imagine the unbounded nature of the circle of their knowledge. My power extends so far as to afford you a glimpse of the nature of a cometary world." I was again in rapid motion, again passing with the utmost velocity through the bright blue sky, and I saw Jupiter and his satellites and Saturn and his ring behind me, and before me the sun, no longer appearing as through a blue mist but in bright and unsupportable ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for a thousandth ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... his regular sustentation of its natural order, rather than by irregular occurrences, such as the deluge, in seeming contravention of it. To seek the evidence of divine activity in human affairs and to ground one's faith in a controlling Providence in sporadic and cometary phenomena, rather than in the constant and cumulative signs of it to be seen in the majestic order of the starry skies, in the reign of intelligence throughout the cosmos, in the moral evolution of ancient savagery into modern philanthropy, in the historic manifestation throughout the centuries ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... this view of the origin of comets harmonizes with the characters of their orbits; but the evidence hence derived is much stronger than was indicated. The great majority of cometary orbits are classed as parabolic; and it is ordinarily inferred that they are visitors from remote space, and will never return. But are they rightly classed as parabolic? Observations on a comet moving in an extremely eccentric ellipse, which are possible only when ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... Through the loud vast and populacy of Heaven, Tempested with gold schools of ponderous orbs, That cleav'st with deep-revolting harmonies Passage perpetual, and behind thee draw'st A furrow sweet, a cometary wake Of trailing music! What large effluence, Not sole the cloudy sighing of thy seas, Nor thy blue-coifing air, encases thee From prying of the stars, and the broad shafts Of thrusting sunlight tempers? For, dropped near From my remov-ed ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson |
