XXV. Comets are not yet fully understood. Many things are in the same category. A future age will be amazed at our ignorance of such matters 298 XXVI. Reasons of apparent movements of Comets. The transparence and shape accounted for 299 XXVII. Parallels to the differences between Comets and other planets 300 XXVIII. Comets give prognostications, but not of immediate events or weather 302 XXIX. Denial of heaviness and slowness of Comets 303 XXX. Humility is as becoming in investigators of the nature of the heavens as in worshippers. God has revealed but a little of Himself to man 304 XXXI. One cannot be surprised that everything has not yet been discovered. We must leave something to succeeding generations. We are not yet fully proficient in vice, though we have striven so long and hard. We still retain, strange to say, some traces of manhood 305 XXXII. We are all given up to low pleasures and vices, and devote our strength to them. Philosophy is kept for wet days. The old teachers have no successors. In fact, we are letting go what they discovered. We at best play with truth, which, as of old, lies at the bottom of the well, and needs the best efforts of young and old, late and early, to bring it to light 307 NOTES BY SIR A. GEIKIE 309 TRANSLATOR’S NOTES ON “AIR,” QUOTATIONS, AND GERCKE’S READINGS 344 INDEX 351 INTRODUCTION SENECA I. LIFE Lucius Annaeus Seneca was the second son of Annaeus Seneca (generally, but apparently without authority, called Marcus Annaeus Seneca) of Corduba (Cordova) in Spain: his mother was a Spanish lady named Helvia. The elder Seneca was himself a man of note. He is known as Seneca the Orator or Rhetorician, in contradistinction to his more famous son, the Philosopher. His works that have come down to us suggest by their titles, _Controversiae_ and _Suasoriae_, the rhetorical character of the contents. Seneca had an elder brother, M. Annaeus Novatus, and a younger one, L. Annaeus Mela (or Mella), father of Lucan the poet (M. Annaeus Lucanus).[1] The family was thus a distinguished one. The poet Martial, himself a Spaniard, speaks of “the house of learned Seneca thrice to be numbered” (iv. 40. 2): the allusion might with equal appropriateness apply either to the three brothers or to the three generations: Seneca the Elder, Seneca, Lucan--father, son, grandson.