The comet had been observed by everybody, so to speak, from the instant it became visible to instruments of moderate power. As for the laboring classes, whose leisure moments were always provided for, the telescopes set up in the public squares had been surrounded by impatient crowds from the first moment of visibility, and every evening the receipts of these astronomers of the open air had been incredible and without precedent. Many workmen, too, had their own instruments, especially in the provinces, and justice, as well as truth, compels us to acknowledge that the first discoverer of the comet (outside of the professional observers) had not been a man of the world, a person of importance, or an academician, but a plain workman of the town of Soissons, who passed the greater portion of his nights under the stars, and who had succeeded in purchasing out of his laboriously accumulated savings an excellent little telescope with which he was in the habit of studying the wonders of the sky. And it is a notable fact that prior to the twenty-fourth century, nearly all the inhabitants of the earth had lived without knowing where they were, without even feeling the curiosity to ask, like blind men, with no other preoccupation than the satisfaction of their appetites; but within a hundred years the human race had begun to observe and reason upon the universe about them. [Illustration] To understand the path of the comet through space, it will be sufficient to examine carefully the accompanying chart. It represents the comet coming from infinite space obliquely towards the earth, and afterwards falling into the sun which does not arrest it in its passage toward perihelion. No account has been taken of the perturbation caused by the earth’s attraction, whose effect would be to bring the comet nearer to the earth’s orbit. All the comets which gravitate about the sun—and they are numerous—describe similar elongated orbits,—ellipses, one of whose foci is occupied by the solar star. The drawing on page 33 gives an idea of the intersections of the cometary and planetary orbits, and the orbit of the earth about the sun. On studying these intersections, we perceive that a collision is neither an impossible nor an abnormal event.