I must confess to a great feeling of disappointment in coming to the conclusion that Prof. Angelitti’s enticing theory must be rejected, but a careful study of Dante’s own words, and Prof. Boffito’s discovery of the “Almanach perpetuum ad annum 1300 inchoatum” seem to leave no other choice. Last April,[564] when helping to photograph Halley’s Comet in beautiful early dawns, this problem was much in my mind. Venus once more had the Fishes in her train, and oddly enough Good Friday had fallen on March 25! I could not help wishing that these things had happened in 1300 as well as in 1910! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [564] This was written in 1910. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ If in spite of all arguments to the contrary, any readers are convinced that Dante’s celestial positions were taken from the real skies, it remains to them to imagine that he saw them in March of 1301 and wove them into the narrative of his poem, although for some reason he adopted another date. The following tables (pp. 425-26) summarize the foregoing pages. It will be noted with what appropriate symbolism Dante enters Hell on the evening of Good Friday, spends that night and the whole of Saturday in the depths, and rises out of them on Easter Day before the dawn. For although he reaches Earth’s centre on Saturday evening by Jerusalem time, the change of hemisphere there makes his time suddenly go back twelve hours, so that it is again Saturday morning, and he spends the day and night of Saturday (Purgatory time) in climbing to Earth’s surface. DAYS OF THE VISION AND POSITIONS OF THE SUN, MOON, AND PLANETS.