“The times are swaying toward degeneration. We are swinging within the evil influence of a strange orbit. Our souls are jarred from their proper bearings. I dare not say all that is revealed to me. It would be too terrible.” Soon after this prophesy was uttered came the first of such suicides. Adam Toma, a wealthy landowner of Szozona, Hungary, cut his throat because of the Comet. He left a note saying that the Comet was the cause of his death. Cardinal Gibbons later expressed his profound belief that the Paris floods of this year were sent by God as a punishment to the Parisians for their frivolities and sins, of which the Comet was a fiery warning. Commenting on Madame de Thebes’ predictions and her connection of the Comet of 1910 with this year’s spring-floods in France, Italy and Germany, the French astronomer Henri Deslandres, late Director of the Astronomical Observatory of Meudon and member of the French Academy of Sciences, said: “However distant Comets may be, it is not at all impossible that their enormous tails, measuring 75,000,000 to 125,000,000 miles in length, may come in contact with our atmosphere. The theory that a Comet may disturb the atmosphere of the earth, causing rains of great duration, and consequently inundations and the sudden overflow of rivers, is not at all absurd. It can be sustained by scientific reasoning.” It should be remembered here that Laplace, one of the greatest of all astronomers, credited the deluge to a Comet. Before Madame de Thebes’ ominous prophesy concerning Halley’s Comet and its effects upon America were cabled over to this country, another, no less dire prediction of financial disaster in the United States, coincident with the appearance of Halley’s Comet, was made by W. E. Corey, the President of the American Steel Trust. [Illustration: THE COMET OF 1910, FROM A TELESCOPIC PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN AT GREENWICH.] Mr. Corey then warned his friends to “call in their money and get from under” because a calamitous financial crash and general business ruin would surely come during the Spring of 1910. The most ominous of all prophesies connected with the coming of Halley’s Comet this year was made by the venerable General Ballington Booth, the head of the Salvation Army. Speaking in London, immediately after Halley’s Comet had been located, early this year, General Booth said: “We are, this year, rapidly approaching the end of all things, with similar results, but far surpassing in horrors any disaster that has gone before. “All things will be wound up. Besides a deluge of water sweeping parts of the world and its inhabitants there will be fierce destruction by fire.” FAMOUS COMETS OF OLDEN TIMES Bacon, the great English thinker, has said: “Comets have some action and effect on the universality of things.”