“Moreover, even viewing the matter from a scientific standpoint, Professor Smyth (who, outside his pyramidal paradoxes, is an astronomer of well-deserved repute) could recognize sufficient reason for regarding the comet as portentous. Many others, indeed, both in America and in Europe, shared his opinion in this respect. A very slight retardation of the course of the comet of 1880, during its passage close to the surface of the sun, would have sufficed to alter its period of revolution from the thirty-seven years assigned on the supposition of its identity with the comet of 1843, to the two and a half years indicated by its apparent return in 1882, and if this had occurred in 1880, a similar interruption in 1882 would have caused its return in less than two and a half years. “Thus, circling in an ever-narrowing (or rather shortening) orbit, it would presently, within a quarter of a century or so, perhaps, have become so far entangled among the atmospheric matter around the sun, that it would have been unable to resist absolute absorption. What the consequences to the solar system might have been none ventured to suggest. Newton had expressed his belief that the effect of such absorption would be disastrous, but the physicists of the nineteenth century, better acquainted with the laws associating heat and motion, were not so despondent. Only Professor Smyth seems to have felt assured (not being despondent but confident) that the comet portended, in a very decisive way, the beginning of the end.